I'm sorry for anyone who missed the road ride, however, as good an idea as it sounds, leaving knowledge of lunch stops extra would have been either impossible or at least very misleading. Also I'm not sure how a quick toilet break could cause you to miss out?
I called everyone together for the road ride twice, we then had a 3 or 4 minute briefing and Q&A session, I then gave a 2 minute warning of departure and I would imagine a group of that size took several minutes to leave the car park
I took over leading the ride at the 11th hour and was expecting a group of maybe 30 odd bikes, not the nearer to 60 who set off with us!!
I had a route planned and programmed into my GPS, we did about a third of it! I just had to make up most of the ride as we went along to suit the size and speed of the group. Have you ever tried keeping a group that size together and on schedule? Not as easy as it sounds
I had an idea of where we would stop for lunch but the sheer size of the group put paid to that. I don't know of a single place in the Peaks that could cope with a group of nearly 70 people turning up to eat without warning!
I only made a decision on the actual lunch stop in Castleton about 5 miles before we got there
Especially as the earlier tea/coffer stop had pretty much turned into a lunch stop anyway after one of the group had a puncture and we lost our Backmarker!
Many thanks to Stevo for steping in and doing an excelent job for the rest of the day
Not an ideal situation and my apologies to everyone on the ride for the lack of organisation. I honestly thought we would have lost far more of a group that size before the first stop
Well done everyone for sticking to the drop off system, especially those who had never used it before.
It would have made far more sense to split the ride into 2 or even 3 smaller groups but unfortunately there just weren't the volunteers available to do that, especially after our designated tail ender drank far too much of Prof's apple juice on Friday night and was incapable of riding a bike on Sat
You know who you are
So far the feedback from those who did make the ride has been good, thank you all for coming and thanks for putting up with the problems along the way