Date: 11/06/2022 St Austell to Bovey Tracey

Our intended start of 9:00 am was delayed 40 mins while Norman put a new chain on his bike. Today could well be our toughest with a lot of climbing and 25 miles further than I have ridden in one day, I'll be happy when today is over.
We had a choice of 2 routes to get to the campsite, no real differnce in the amount climbing to do but would be dependent on the weather, poor weather and we go through Plymouth, but it was sunny again with the wind behind us so we took the route over Dartmoor, our favoured option.
The climbing started almost straight away and was a series of ups & downs and I was having to drop to the lowest possible gear as we headed north to Nanpean and Roche, we made a mistake here and ended up taking a longer route than planned to get to the NT car park just south of Bodmin where we had arranged to meet Rodney.
We stayed south of the River Fowey using mainly minor roads through moorland taking every opportunity for a short break by finding something to photograph.
We met up with Rodney at 13:30 at Upton Cross for a short break and we all got a Cornish Pastie from the local shop. At Bray Shop we departed from the planned route, taking the B3257 and A390 through Gunnislake into Tavistock for 15:15.
This next stage would be the hardest, the climb starting straight away with the B3357 taking us out of Tavistock for 6 miles up onto Dartmoor proper.
The climbing never let up reaching a height of 500m on 2 occasions and we kept asking Nick is this the last climb?
Only after we had done nearly 60 miles did we start our final descent. We missed the planned turnoff on to a minor road so continued on B3212 to Moretonhampstead then used the A382 to get to Bovey Tracey and the campsite at Oakmoor Touring Park.

We didn't  get to the campsite until around 7 pm, it had been a long day today, 9 hours in the saddle to do 77.7 miles with 7500 ft of climbing.

Getting back so late we decided to get a takeaway delivered to the campsite, by the time we got the tent up I was feeling sick
it could have been the Cornish Pastie or the whole 1 litre of juice I drank during the day and had to have a lie down.
I felt a lot better after a shower and managed to eat some pizza and drank 3 mugs of tea but I was too knackered to write a log tonight.