After a frantic few days of packing, repacking, buying extra items to aid packing (once we had the panniers we had a better idea of how we wanted to fit things, we delivered the bikes to James Cargo for air freighting to Toronto.
As we pootled down the M56 it occured to me that this was actually our shake down run, it was the 1st time we had both been out with the full kit load. We resisted the temptation to pitch the tent and repack as a final experiment.

It has been 3 years since I was at James Cargo, but one of the staff recognised me and even remembered the fun and games we had with FlyGLobaspan back in 2007.

I had to remove one of my panniers to allow the bike to fit in the crate, Jean's being 1 inch less didn't need it.

We were going to walk to Manchester Airport to catch the train, but the aforementioned JC employee kindly gave us a lift as it was 3 miles away.

A couple of hours later (we still had a 2 mile walk from the St Helens Junction to home) we came back, looked in the garage and it seemed empty... with only 2 bikes in it :-)

We just have the small matter of our son's wedding this weekend and then we hit the (long) road next Wednesday.