See Northerners, we have hills too!	Luxury farmer's field campsite	Sunset in tent city
One broken Spud, but one good result

Billed as the South Downs, this one was based to the West of Salisbury, on and to the South of Salisbury Plain. This is home turf for me! The smaller hills and warm weather seemed to frighten off many of the grit hardened Northerners, leaving Spud and I with something of a gap to exploit.

In an unusual role reversal, I was feeling rather fit while Spud was feeling rather awful. So I did what seemed right, pushed us quite hard, and we ticked off the checkpoints like never before. Yes the terrain was "easy", but last time in Exmoor we visited 6 checkpoints on day 1. Here, we visited 14, and of our 7 hours time allowance we used 7 hours and 2 minutes (losing us 5 points from 400).

It was a similar situation on the Sunday. 13 checkpoints visited, and 5 hours precisely used out of the 5 hours allowed. The last few miles were spent shouting "on your left!" as we barrelled past other teams trying to avoid a time penalty. That last effort nearly finished off Spud. Sorry, Spud.

Overall position: best ever 48^th / 325 teams.