During the last week of the summer holidays, a group of five Sixth Form girls (Emily Fields, Ellie Lawton, Emma Brown, Amy Lammin and Elise Ferretti) undertook their Gold Duke of Edinburgh Award qualifying expedition. Here is a summary of their expedition:
Over the course of four days, we cycled a total of almost 200km along the C2C route, across the Lake District and the Pennines. It was a truly exhausting, yet very rewarding experience for everyone who took part.
We travelled up to Cumbria the day before the start of our expedition and spent the night in a village hall, preparing maps and route cards for the next 4 days. The next morning, we set off bright and early to St Bees on the coast, where we collected our hire bikes and packed all of our equipment into some very heavy panniers. We then set off for 4 days of cycling, with 3 nights camping in between.
On the first day of cycling we supported each other very well through various injuries and mechanical problems, and were also positively surprised at how friendly all the cyclists were - they stopped to help whenever it looked like we needed it, and we even managed to bump into the same group twice on separate days!
By far the biggest challenge achievement of the expedition was reaching the Hartside café at Hartside summit, the highest café in England at 2480ft. Collectively it took us almost an hour to reach the top, but again everyone was very supportive of each other and we really kept the morale strong throughout.
Overall, what stood out for us most about the expedition was how well we stuck together as a team and showed resilience. We would like to thank Mr Ellis for organising the trip, and all the help he has given us with DofE. Thank you as well to Mr Bowden for the constant supply of wine gums to keep our spirits up! Mrs Morgan was an inspiration to all of us as she kept going up every single hill, no matter how tough it got. Finally, although it was very frustrating to see Mr Castro speeding past us so frequently, we are very grateful to him for the motivation he provided.
