Last weekend four of us decided to challenge the might of the two wheeled
fraternity by entering a Cycle Treasure Hunt around the City of London. The
event involved following a fixed route around the City and solving clues based
on observation along the way.
We split into two teams of two for the competition, The Big Wheels consisted of
Peter Philip (28") and James “Plungers” Bentley (28") and the Little Wheels were
John Dash (24") and myself (26").
At the start I stood around wondering if it had been wise to turn up as the rain
came down hard and, since the weather had been fine when I set off from home, I
hadn’t got any wet weather gear. Fortunately the rain stopped just before we
were due to leave and the rest of the afternoon was dry.
The start was staggered to avoid too many people being bunched together and
because we had waited for the rain to stop the two unicycle teams were close to
being last to start. We set off without too much expectation of seeing much of
the bicycle teams but very soon we did start to catch up and pass a number of
them as we seemed to be faster at solving clues and also riding unicycles made
it easier to read the instructions while riding.
As the day wore on a serious competition developed between the two unicycle
teams with the lead on the road alternating between us and it was necessary to
disguise the fact that you had found the answer to a clue so that the others
could not tell the location of the solution.
We arrived at the finish after around 2 1/2 hours a little sorer around the
saddle but we had all really enjoyed the day as it made a nice change from our
usual, more frantic, hockey meetings. We were even more pleased to discover,
when the results were counted, that Peter and James had come third overall and
John and I had won. Our times had been very similar but John and I had only got
one question wrong ( Getting wrong answers resulted in time penalties and
certain more difficult clues gave time bonuses ).