Tour de Yorkshire

Dover - Shetland Day 16
Whitby - Stockton-on-Tees

Distance cycled: today 73.2km, total 1,173.4km
Ascent: today 778m, total 6430m

Highlight: my AirBnB accommodation which I have booked for a couple of days, so I can take a day off to watch Andy Murray try to win the French Open title. Very nice en suite room and incredibly friendly and helpful local couple who did a load of washing, invited me to join them for dinner & a bottle of wine and even managed to find someone local to give me a sports massage Sunday morning ahead of the match. Not sure any hotel could match that, especially for £60 per night!

Lowlight: thick high speed mist obscuring what might have been fine views in the North Yorkshire moors, with gritty urban Middlesborough to traverse to reach my destination, once out of the hills.

What else: had my recovery afternoon tea and cake in the delightful village of Great Ayton, on the northern edge of the moors. My memory served me wrong in yesterday's post, as Captain James Cook was born in Marton (now a southern suburb of Middlesborough), before moving to Great Ayton at a young age, where his (inevitably Scottish) father found work as a farm labourer. He went to the local school from the age of 8 to 13, before working on the farm for his father. Left home for the coast at 16, finding a job as a seaman on a merchant coal ship. He joined the RN at 25 and taught himself surveying and astronomy, doing a rather good job of mapping Newfoundland Canada to earn him his big break and being made Captain of the Endeavour (a converted coal ship, in which he surveyed NZ, most of Oz and the US & Canadian west coast over three 3 year voyages). All this and more from the excellent free James Cook schoolhouse in Great Ayton - worth a visit for sure.

Photo: unbeknown to me at the time, today's route took in many places passed through by the 3rd and final stage of the 2016 Tour de Yorkshire. Street art celebrating the Tour is a big feature of it and these chaps were cycling along the wall of the James Cook schoolhouse museum.