I booked to go with Baxters for only really 3 reasons:
1. I was worried about how (in)capable I would be of getting back after the ride either by bike or car.
3. There seemed to be no information on whether any official storage for luggage would be available during the ride, and I was definitely not prepared to lug the clothes I travelled to France in around 1230km!
2. I wanted to have a bag drop option so I could have a change of shorts a couple of times during the ride without carrying touring weight luggage around with me.
On those 3 counts Baxters did actually deliver. They got me there and back, they stored my luggage in the hotel (even though this was in an insecure room shared by other tour parties) and they provided the bag drops at Fougeres and Carhaix. However I hadn't been bargaining on some of the aspects of the service that had not even crossed my mind in advance.
1. A week before we were due to leave we still had no itinerary and had no communication whatsoever from Baxters since the day they had taken the money. I couldn't plan my travel the 130 miles to the pick up point until I knew for sure where and when it was. I did some digging to see if they had actually gone bankrupt in the days before the ride when i should have been worrying about other things!
2. Hazza! 5 days before travel an email arrives telling me that 'bike trailer' is actually just 'trailer', and my bike must be fully disassembled and put in a soft bike bag or will be refused for travel. I don't know how to take apart or reassemble my bike and this is frankly the last thing on earth I want to be doing to a bike that's been set up has been fine tuned over months and months by other people, immediately before the epic ride of my life. Oh, and I don't actually own a bike bag. Seriously considered flushing the £650 down the toilet and making other plans for the journey over. In hindsight this is exactly what I should have done. What I actually did was frantically order a bike bag on next day delivery then sit at home all day when I should have been somewhere else, waiting for it to arrive. Then spent a whole day getting my bike into it when I should have been packing my suitcase, resting, and planning for the ride.
3. Turned up at the pickup point at the NEC in Birmingham, trusting that the promise that bikes would be safe in bike bags because hard cases and boxes would be refused. I had even been told there was no need to remove the rear mech from the frame because great care would be taken. I was more than a little bit dismayed to see someone else's bike packed in a large cardboard box waiting to be loaded. It seems they had been told this was OK. If I could have turned round and made my own way to France I probably would have done at this point. Coach 2 then arrived, and the bikes were loaded 1 layer deep into it's trailer. So far so good. I did my best to relax. Arrived at Watford gap services where I had to change to coach 1 for the 3* hotel. My bike was thrown unceremoniously into a trailer 3 deep in a mixture of bike bags, hard cases and boxes. At every stop more bikes were thrown in any old how, until the crowning glory was 2 heavy plastic cases loaded at Dover, one at a 90 degree diagonal angle to the side of Simon's bike bag. We didn't find out about this until we arrived at the hotel, where rather then relaxing and going up to the room we spent an anxious hour inspecting the damage. The next morning Simon spent a total of 2 hours truing the crushed rear wheel and repairing the damaged bars and levers. I felt like the biggest mug in the world for obeying an order to inadequately protect my bike on the basis this company would look after it.
4. The hotel itself was very nice, but it became immediately apparent that the route in to the PBP start was 12km long over a very unpleasant and often dangerous route. It was sited at the junction of huge trunk roads and dual carriageways in a location ideal to access by car. And lots of people were accessing this area by car. On the first full day there one member of our party was hit by a car at a roundabout near the hotel, and although he did start the ride he only made it as far as Carhaix because of his injuries. The distance to the start seemed worse somehow knowing that the Baxters 2* hotel was less than 3km out.
5. The food was of a lower standard than any school meal I was ever fed in the 70's and 80's. The hotel's chef was away on holiday, and whoever had been left behind to cater for us seemed to have been instructed to feed us a bland item of protein (no sauces or seasoning) and a massive pile of bland carbohydrate only. There was only one meal on offer. If you were vegetarian then they would grudgingly remove the lump of chicken or fish from your plate and just give you the plate of bare rice or pasta back again (with the stain of where the lump of animal had been of course). I'm not vegetarian but was pretty horrified on behalf of those who were. When asked if they could provide an omelette or some other alternative, the answer was simply 'non'.
6. Breakfasts I didn't have a problem with what was offered, in that it was a typical continental breakfast and we were on the continent. But there was a tendency for food to just run out, and if you got up fairly late (but still during the advertised time of the breakfast), you might arrive to find someone wheeling the dregs away and nothing left at all! There were random huge bowls of pasta or rice provided with nothing to go with them. We wondered if they were what was left over of the previous nights huge bare carbo offerings that most of us just couldn't eat because there was nothing to eat them with.
7. I made the fatal mistake on the Saturday of actually reading all the official PBP blurb. I then became worried because there were clear rules about support vehicles and declaring and registering them. I hadn't got the box ticked on my registration for support vehicle and neither had Simon. We asked the Baxters staff if the coaches had been officially registered. The penalty for using an unregistered support vehicle is 5 hours. The Baxters staff had no clue what I was talking about and said that no, this had not been done. Denise suggested that Eddie, the driver of the other coach, was more than likely seeing to this since he actually knew what he was doing. We desperately hoped that she was right, but seriously considered not doing the bag drops at all just in case.
8. after the ride having arrived back at just after 1pm on the Thursday, had a drink in the bar and chat to other yacfers, we then rode back the 12km (it's actually a miracle we are still alive after that journey). We were then told we had until 6pm to pack our bikes for loading on to the coach. Since by then it was gone 4pm, it had taken me a few hours to take my bike apart at home and carefully pack it, and that was when I could actually walk and bend over and had more than 11 hours sleep in 5 days, this seemed a somewhat unreasonable request.
On arriving at the hotel the stress of what had happened to the bikes on the way out came flooding back to me, and I decided that since it was then too late for me to obtain a f**-off heavy plastic monstrous box for my bike to protect it from other peoples f***-off heavy boxes, I was going to take the law into my own hands and personally protect my bike from damage. I informed the Baxters staff that my bike was going with me to my room, and that I would personally load it in the morning plus get off at every stop so that no one else would either move my bike or recklessly pile stuff on top of it. Whilst the coach driver didn't seem happy about this at all, since Baxters had already breached their own contract there was not much they could do about it.
9. The crowning glory of the whole tour was when the moron in the seat behind told me I was not allowed to recline my seat otherwise I 'would be very sure to have an uncomfortable journey', and then proceeded to kick and knee me in the back. Being in both a poor mental and physical state my tolerance threshold for such fuckwittery was low and I offered to rearrange his face for him if he didn't desist. When he told Simon to please keep his monkey under control things really kicked off. No member of Baxters staff bothered to find out what the shouting was about, and I really should have lodged a complaint against the other passenger for both the physical and verbal assault.
In summary, would I ever do it again with Baxters? Hell no.
