Four Days to D-Day

I'm terrified. One of the highlights of my day is dragging my exhausted body to bed, curling up on the thick, squishy mattress, and wrapping the bulky duvet around me. On the road, I'm going to be pitching a tent, rolling out a thin foam mattress, and crawling into a sleeping bag. One of the points of riding was to spend less than the £150 it would have cost me to get there by train; I can't get my budget to work out if I sleep in hotel rooms. 

In old-school adventures, the discomfort of sleeping on the floor is glossed over. However, I've been camping enough times to know that hips and lower backs don't take well to sleeping on hard surfaces. I've also camped in the UK enough times to know that it's always cold. Even in mid-summer, it rains, blows a gale, and freezes the backside off any camper foolhardy enough to venture outside. 

I'm hoping that, by using hiking tricks - changing out of the sweaty clothes as soon as I stop, adding dry layers as my body cools down, and using a sleeping bag liner - I can avoid hypothermia. I'm not sure how to avoid the constant body-ache, but I'm packing heat lotion to try counter-act it. Oh, and a daily stretching routine to work the kinks and aches out of my muscles. I'm going to look ridiculous: wearing a dress while riding a bicycle, and stopping to pitch a tent and do a full round of stretches. But as Steve Jobs once said, "stay hungry, stay foolish." This trip is probably the height of foolishness, but I'm hungry for what I'll learn.