Dear all
With a heavy heart, we have decided we need to cancel the Mince Pie Rides tomorrow. The general view from the weather forecasts has deteriorated. It is uncertain whether we might get snow or not – but it will certainly be below zero and freezing fog is quite likely. A number of the local clubs have now cancelled their rides and I know that our own leaders for the rides are also not comfortable with the conditions.
We have only had to cancel once before – in 2017 when we woke up to several inches of snow on the ground – and so we will follow a similar protocol now as we used then:
- as always, your generous donations of ingredients have been great to see and we want to honour that as positively as possible. Therefore, Carin is starting the great wine mulling process now and we will back-fill all the screw-top bottles we have with the delicious finished product and make this available to members. The mince pies and cranberry juice generally have expiry dates good enough to enable them to be donated to the local Food Bank or Community Larder and this will again be a somewhat positive outcome.
- the lunch booked for the Fox at Denchworth tomorrow will go ahead as normal.
- if you haven’t already done so, we would ask you to consider donating to our chosen charity Whizz-Kidz as we would like to cover the shortfall from the cash we would have taken on the Hill. We will be asking the other clubs to consider this as well. The giving page is at:
www.justgiving.com/fundraising/whitehorsecyclechallenge2022
(I should add that we have already raised a very respectable £600 from those who have undertaken Challenge rides during the last two weeks)
A sad and frustrating outcome after a lot of hard work by all concerned, but we need to keep leaders, riders and the serving team safe and we are sure this is the right decision.
Best regards
John
