Well, that’s it: goodbye Scotland, hello England. As Vinnie Jones might say, it’s been emotional.

Apart from surely winning some kind of prize for the most characters in an A-to-B style blog title, today was fairly unremarkable from a cycling perspective. Aside from an hour or so crossing the northern edge of the Galloway forest this morning, the scenery’s been pretty ordinary, but at least the A-roads we were riding on were extremely quiet – more like English B-roads – and we made pretty good progress. Geoff’s knee seemed to be holding up okay after the previous day’s exertions too, and we pushed on towards the border in good spirits.

After a few hours riding and a pit-stop at Annan, we reached Gretna Green shortly after lunch. I’m sorry to report that Geoff didn’t improve on his status as a single man at the mecca for hastily arranged marriages; unfortunately the only birds we’ve seen so far have been ospreys, kites, herons, puffins and Arctic terns, which he claims are “not really wife material”. Some people are so fussy!On the plus side, however, neither Bailey nor I returned to the country as a bigamist, so it’s not all bad. After taking the compulsory photo of The Last House in Scotland (where over 10,000 secret/shotgun marriages have been performed to date) we finally reached England.

It’s funny the difference a geographical boundary makes. After all, it should be just an arbitrary line in the sand, drawn up by long-dead politicians. But there was a definite shift as we crossed the border. Perhaps it was the fact that, just 20 yards after passing the sign, you get spat out onto the M6 (or in our case, a road running parallel to it). It was quite a culture shock! Having experienced nothing but courteous drivers and empty roads for the past 450-odd miles, we had three altercations with dangerous tw@ts in the first five minutes of being back in England. The roads were now much busier, filled with impatient commuters trying to beat rush hour, and it was a reminder that whilst we might have got away with riding A-roads in sparsely populated Scotland, down here it would be a different proposition.

It wasn’t until we entered the northern edge of the Lake District that the traffic eased off. We were all pretty tired by this stage after another 80-mile day and a relatively low calorie intake. We burn about 4000 calories for each day’s ride, so add that to the 2500 daily calories we need just to survive and it’s clear we have to consume a lot of food! Yesterday I think we cut it a bit fine. To our credit, we did try to make up for it by hitting the local pub in the beautiful village of Hesket Newmarket (a community-owned boozer where the locals are paid an annual dividend in beer, and that is reportedly Prince Charles’ favourite watering hole) to neck some easy calories, but I’m not sure that counts!

Tomorrow it’s down through the Lakes via Keswick, Thirlmere, Ambleside and Windermere. The weather’s set to hit 20 degrees plus. Could be an interesting day!