last year when we sat in the cosy Creation Café at The Angel Centre!  With 5 weeks left of training and lots of money to raise, our jolly jaunt on bikes down to Denman College (the WI Mecca) in Oxfordshire feels more like Chris Rea’s ‘Road to Hell’!  Training rides have become serious, no more chatting as we pootle along through the streets of Salford.  Now it’s all about our average speed, how many miles we can squeeze in and when we’re going out on the next training ride.

As you may have gathered, reality has kicked in for our intrepid WI cyclists (remember most have not ridden a bike since before Justin Bieber was born!). We’ve had falls, A&E visits, tears, pain, sore bums, tantrums, a little of Catatonia’s ‘Road Rage’ and more but along this long and winding road of training we have seen resilience, courage, comradeship, laughter, flap jack, ice creams and of course tea and cake.  For every 60 minutes of cycling we know that we can tuck in to the biggest slice of cake guilt free!

Only a few Salford Angels ladies will be tackling this ride, but we are all busy baking and volunteering to fundraise so that we can hit our target of £3,000!  Next week we have got a cake bake at The Angel Centre on Friday 3rd May (all cakes kindly baked by the team at Social adVentures!), we’ve got a stall at St Pauls Church, Eccles on Saturday 4th May for the MS Society and of course we’ve got our tearoom at The Angel Centre on Sunday 5th May for Sounds from the Other City!

For the big ride we have an amazing support team giving up their time to help us by driving the mini bus, driving the van, taking pictures, tweeting, meeting up with other WIs en-route, massaging sore shoulders (oh yes Mr Collins is in training!).  So as you can see, the ride that seemed so easy last year has become a military operation from basic training through to the logistics corp supporting us every mile of the 160 miles of the way.  Will we be dancing in the streets when we arrive? We’ll give you the exclusive story after the final May bank holiday so watch this space!