Cycle Cuba

ITV's "This Morning" coverage of our Cuba Challenge (Part 1, Day 1)

Hooray, it's all systems go now...

Here is the first part of the Cycle Cuba 2008 coverage, enjoy...

Once again a HUGE thank you to ITV's "This Morning" for allowing us to share this with you - thank you so much!!!

"This Morning" footage coming soon...

Hello all

Have very nearly finished off the last few days of cycling in draft and very excited as the wonderful "This Morning" team have given their blessing for me to include some of their footage of the event...

Friday should see the first uploads going live so watch this space...

D xxx

Day 1 - en route... Heathrow to Paris to Havana

We had an early start - up at the crack of dawn so that we could catch the Hoppa bus to Heathrow so that we could meet up with the gang...

We were there for hours (and then we were delayed :)) - everyone was in good spirits despite the wait and there was a great deal of excited chatter as we met up with some of the people we'd met on our Cotswolds training weekend as well as a whole lot of new faces including Fern who is lovely!

Finally we boarded the plane and within no time at all we had arrived in Paris where we had a good 3 hour wait... 

We made good use of the time and did a bit of shopping...  neither of us had packed a scarf (a must on our packing list) so decided to see about buying one at the airport.  Well we searched and searched and the only shops with any half decent scarves were Hermes and another designer one.  Caught up in the moment and not really thinking about the current £ euro exchange rate - we bought some very nice scarves from Hermes and Christian Lacouix!!!  (I'm considering framing mine as a work of art ;))

In Paris, I started to feel pretty ill (damn Thai meal) and continued to feel pretty peeky for the rest of the day and the entire LONG flight to Cuba and was really worried that I had the start of some dreadful bug and that I wouldn't be able to cycle...

(Photo - Julz Goldsmith) 

I wasn't very good company but luckily Val felt fine and could chat to the others on the plane.

We finally arrived in Havana that evening (it was dark already) and boy, was it hot!  Actually it was the humidity more than the heat that got us - there seemed to be no air at all and we were all sweating buckets pretty much immediately.

We collected our luggage and were met by the "crew" and then transfered to our hotel via two great big coaches. 

We had a chance to freshen up before our very first evening briefing and dinner. 

This is a nice hotel and the best thing about it is the airconditioning in our room - it's fabulous!!!!