C2C (Sea to Sea) – St John’s Chapel to Sunderland – Tour Diary – Day 3

Day 3 of our Sea to Sea (C2C) UK Coast to Coast Cycle. This is our final tour diary of our three day C2C trip. Join us for what should be he easiest day of the trip, but turns out to be much more of a challenge than expected!

Other Videos In the Series:
Tour Diary Day 1 – https://youtu.be/RE4_Ic2k0cg
Tour Diary Day 2 – https://youtu.be/IfZOOfLJZi8
Tour Diary Day 3 – https://youtu.be/b2z1zjf0h6c
C2C – Live 10th Sept

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It’s day three. We are here finished in Sunderland, which is actually a nicer place than we seem to be to be honest. It’s a quite nice beachy town. Uh it was a cold, wet day. It’s bloody miserable. It really was. So, I mean, it started off bloody miserable and bad and got worse and then it got worse. So, the hill that we expected to be bad was really, really bad. It started off a bit drizzly, cloudy. You made up that hill there, didn’t you? I did make it up the hill. I w Nothing to be ashamed of. That was It was a 25%. I thought I would save my leg front wheel. It was Yeah, a little bit rough, but yeah, made it up into cloud line. Cloud line was actually clear. Uh, which is actually really bizarre to get into Cloud Line and find that was dry. And then coming back out of it, it was wet, wet, wet, wet, wet. And it just didn’t Well, it stopped occasionally just so you get feeling a little bit confident and then it would start again. Almost dried out almost. And then yeah, rain. And the hardest part of today was we turned off what we assumed was the CC track and it again seemed very much the off-road mountain bike track. Well, we got to Rook Hope, a little village, and then went up the road, assuming that was the way, and then realized, oh no, off this track, this farm track, which was very grally. Yeah. Which our bikes were not really built for. Tires definitely weren’t built for. That’s the problem. I don’t know if that can’t really It doesn’t feel as though that that’s the only way to do it. If anyone’s on a road bike, no, you’ve got no hope of doing that. Um, we really really struggled with our touring bikes. We were constantly getting off the touring bikes. I fell off fell off twice. It’s mountain bikes only. So, yeah, you’re getting down this this tiny You’ve got like 2 in of um tire really banked uh track and your pedals are hitting the the track. It’s so ruted. Yeah. So, you can’t actually pedal through it. So, you have to be on the grass. So, it’s fine, but you can’t be on the grass because it’s very uneven. Um, which is how just Yeah. Get So, yeah. Back into the ruted. I genuinely don’t see how anybody with a gravel bike could even enjoy that. It’s basically a walking track. It’s a walker’s track. It is. And that’s it. There was a sign at the other end that said this is a grousing track, so don’t actually if you if it’s grousing season, you can’t come through here. But equally, no other signs to say where you had to go. So, I don’t know. It feels as though we missed a warning. Don’t take your bike up there cuz it’s not really a cycling track. I mean, it feels as though we missed a section, but or feels like we missed a main road, which obviously it wasn’t cuz this is all pre-planned, pre-programmed route. So, it is supposed to be CC. Said it was CC. I don’t know how anybody’s doing that road. But anyway, but aside from that, once we got through there, a very tiny bit of road, then back on a gravel track and then on to woodland really. I suppose that that was okay. That was okay. Very standard kind of woodland fair, which was fine. And that pretty much carried on downhill slowly but surely to here. It was a very long trail in order to get here. But um and it was pleasant. It’s just the weather was very much against us. Um I would happily do CC to see again, but I would only do on a mountain bike. And I found that a surprise. And to be fair, that’s a little bit of our own fault. We should have looked into it a bit more. We just kind of assumed that C to coast to coast kind of solution is going to be it’s the cycling rate you assume that well I I’d seen enough stuff that I hadn’t watched cuz I basically I don’t like watching videos of the stuff we’re about to do cuz I I find it spoils it for me. I like to actually just do things myself and then look at stuff afterwards. But there were plenty of people saying doing it in 24 hours and stuff like that or doing it in a day. Sorry, not in 24 hours but doing it in a day that you on a road bike. But heyo, nevertheless for that C to see really good route would recommend mountain bike ideally. And then you got the options of doing you don’t have to do like the entire mountain bike off-road section, but you can do bits of it. We will come back and do the mountain bike bit at some point. So we’ll have more of an opinion then. That’s pretty much it, I think. Anything more to add? I think that was today really. So yeah, just to say the the Sunland section was surprisingly nice actually. Yeah. along the coast um marina and then beach and yeah I mean it’s it’s a nice nice area you got lots of pubs lots of restaurants and they’re actually all nice and they are reasonably affordable so it is actually a really good place to end it similar to like the jo kind of end point on this so you have like the big sign at the start of CTC and I know at the end you can stop here at Sunderland I think Newcastle sign or something but we kind of missed it there’s an ornament or something like a big black square with a hole in it that we cycled past, but we we went more for the dipping our wheel thing. So yeah, the bikes are now officially christened of Irish to North Sea. So we did it properly, even though one of us didn’t want to. That was it. Thanks for watching and we shall see you next