In the beginning ......

Saturday 31st March 2012

The Drive Up

We began the day with a Supermarket breakfast with good friend Danny Call. Having completed most of the packing and search for diesel the night before, we thought a leisurely cooked meal would be a great start to our trip!

We then had some faith restored in humanity thanks to the good people at 'U Drive'. With support driver Matt struggling to find his counterpart driving licence and facing a £20 processing fee to insure the van without it, they happily wavered the charge in support of our charitable effort!!

So we hit the road in our brand new (just 280 miles on the clock when we picked it up from Vanworx, who generously sponsored the vehicle) VW transporter all singing all dancing converted campervan!! We were so excited and desperate to see people we knew to show off the van, sadly we didn't see many so we,ll take lots of photos to show it off to you instead.

We stopped off halfway at Matt's parents' place in Telford for a spectacular fish pie followed by trifle. It was great to meet them and their kindness was further demonstration of the support that we have received in preparation for ultra running the length of Wales.

We left Telford around 4pm and made our way across Wales stopping first at Langollen, a beautifully picturesque town with white water cutting it in half and an old steam railway providing even more character. Next we stopped at the base of Snowdon and watched as the sun came bursting through to add to a dramatic sky that was quite stunning!

We capped off a very exciting day with another great feed. We shall happily be getting used to Matt's culinary skills as he whipped up a magnificent paella whilst we all ran around trying to familiarise ourselves with the van and all of it's extras!

We will go to sleep very excited about the challenge ahead. Just driving down the Llanberis pass was enough to wet our appetite and illustrate just how tough this is going to be. But we are under no illusions about that fact anyway. We have trained hard over difficult terrain clocking up to and in excess of 100 miles per week during our peak training stage. We are ready to go running for Sol.

Due to a lack of wifi/3G/carrier pigeon photos will be added tomorrow - too many mountains!!