London Edinburgh London via Morpheus

Without getting overly prophetic, today marked the start of a Great Journey.

Towards the end of July, John and I will be attempting LEL2013, or the London-Edinburgh-London audax. This is about as straightforward as it sounds. Early on the 28th July, we’ll set off from Buckingham Palace with a couple of hundred other cyclists and head north. Hopefully sometime later we’ll reach Edinburgh. Then we turn around and head back, arriving back in London before the end of the event on the 2nd of August.

That’s rather a long way in six days.

Not wishing to stick to convention, we’ll also be riding a somewhat peculiar bike. Enter, The Morpheus.

Yup. That’s a tandem, with a recumbent front half and an upright back half, designed by the fine people at Circe Cycles and generously loaned to us by David at Laid Back Bikes. More on that soon.

Not being complete fools, we thought a quick trial ride to ensure that the match was vaguely compatible would be a good idea. With Uberuce leading the way (and initial encouragement provided by the exploits of SRD and co on their Circe Helios three-person device), we spent a few hours this afternoon gently pottering around Edinburgh and Cramond.

It really is a superb machine.

I’ll add our initial impressions in a separate post, but it’s definitely up there with the most fun I’ve had on a bike. We’re massively more confident now than this morning that we might actually achieve our goal!

As a closing statement, we’re not doing this for charity. We’re doing it because we’ll have a great time. However, given the amount of people whose first question is ‘who are you raising money for?’, it would be a shame to waste all that goodwill!

Therefore we will be collecting whatever people feel like giving, and we’ll pass it directly on to the Yorkhill Children’s Foundation in Glasgow. Expect a just giving page or similar at some point.