Day 10 - Helmsdale to John o'Groats. The end.

The final stretch. The last 52 miles.

All of our hard work. It all came down to the final push and having finally set off at 10am, after faffing over Paul's rear tyre - AGAIN - realising that my front wheel wasn't actually attached to the bike (!) and then waiting while I bought the final supplies (then found out that the local shop didn't accept debit cards, so going on a wild goose chase to find a cash point).

The final day was genuinely fun. The only person low light was losing a contact lens at the top of a hill, then seeing both replacements blow away on the Scottish wind. I had to make do with replacing with a grit-filled lens that I somehow found on the road. Teary-eyed, but undeterred, we carried on.

We'd been warned that the final leg was hilly and there was a massive hill just a little outside Helmsdale. We found this hill and slowly, but surely managed to climb it. And boy did we nail the speed on the other side, I nearly broke 40mph, something the others had done several times over the last 9 days, but only got to 39.6mph. Good enough though, especially as my brakes stopped working properly several days ago.

Then something funny happened. An even bigger hill arrived. Yes, we'd got it wrong, the first hill wasn't "THE HILL". It was the warm up. We got through it, but my word we worked for our money.

After that we decided to have a little fun and raced our way to Wick, which was the final brief stop before getting there. Each of us averaged well over 20mph for the 10 miles to Wick. Each overtook at some point, finally after 9 days and nearly 900 miles, we got to enjoy ourselves.

At our stop in Wick, in the bright, summery sunshine, Paul uttered the immortal line "Well, even I'm going to tempt fate and say it's not going to rain before we get to John o'Groats".

20 minutes later, having waiting at the top of the final hill outside Jo'G while Paul caught me and Bri up, the inevitable happened. A massive hailstorm arrived.

Our descent into John o'Groats was wind assisted, plus also assisted by the burning desire to get the heck out of this hailstorm that Paul has brought upon us.

We were greeted, inevitably by our cheering support crew, Dave, Val, Mel and Maddie. They presented us with a bottle of champagne and their warmest congratulations. We'd finally made it.

Having posted for photos, we retired to the cafe and opened the champagne. Or, to be more accurate, Paul opened the champagne over the inside of the whole cafe. Smooth.

We settled down for a hard-earned drink and chatted to the other cyclists who'd turned up (like it or not, a lot of people seem to manage to do this challenge. At least a dozen turned up in the hour we were there!). In a brilliant coincidence, Gaz and Paul turned up 30 minutes after us, these were the two guys we'd met at Land's End on our first day, who had no idea how they were going to get to John o'Groats or how long it'd take (they were less prepared for me! One was doing it in hiking boots and they were both carrying their own stuff).

After this, we retired back to our B&Bs in Wick for a hearty, hearty dinner and drinks to watch the World Cup and unwind. It's probably only just starting to sink in what we've achieved.

Photos will follow soon. Laptop doesn't seem to recognise my iPhone at the moment. There's technology for you...