Tour de Wards

'We had a successful ride around all the offices on Sunday.

Richard, Jon, me, Alayne and Clare Magg's husband Steve started from Bradley Stoke fuelled by energy cake from Steve's Mum. We went to a sleepy Yate then through Westerleigh and climbing up to Downend, to Staple Hill office, where Jess & Mr Williams welcomed us. Then rolled down to Broad St where we said goodbye to Alayne.

After Broad St the four remaining rode on to Nailsea as the rain set in, cycling against the flow of Bristol's Biggest Bike Ride, where, after approaching the Courtyard gates to fulfil our mission of visiting every office, we repaired to the charming Old Barn for congenial refreshment, before tackling the alpine ascent towards Portishead.

Mr Wilson managed the greater part of the ascent without changing to his lowest gears unlike the rest of us who took every available mechanical advantage.

Chris Perkins joined us at Portishead for the run to Clevedon. Again a nice climb up to Alexandra Road where Amy & Mr Jones met us with mugs of tea and wonderful home-made chocolate-covered rice crispie cakes!

After Clevedon the rain abated somewhat. Chris returned to Portishead to pick up his car, and Paul Hayward joined us to navigate our way to Worle.

You will see that the majority of the bikes used were narrow-wheeled road bikes but Mr Hayward on his mountain bike, took us down a lovely wet muddy track which made an interesting change to tarmac.

Julie met us at Worle and thence the final run into the WSM where we had an amazingly large welcoming committee, Sylvie's delicious home made soups and a welcome sit down. Some of us had not seen the new "concours d'elegance" office suite which is even furnished with a dishwasher.

We covered 57.5 miles all told, in 4h40min of riding time. The support we had along the way and at the end, was fantastic and the riders are very grateful for that.

We have pictorial evidence to show that we did indeed visit each office. We even took a detour to see our former offices in Portishead !

Thank you to all our riders for taking part in this so enthusiastically.

Thank you Chris for assisting with transport after the ride.

Thank you all for sponsoring us - with offline fundraising we have so far raised over £1,000 for the Wards Charitable Foundation and ultimately, the Jessie May Trust, which I think is rather good'.