2000: Over Xmas/New Year 99/00 I again went to Sri Lanka for five weeks to celebrate what was, depending on how you regard this, either the start of the new millennium of the start of the final year of the 20th Century – call me a pedant, but to me a century starts at one and ends at a hundred, whilst a millenium starts at one and ends at a thousand, so the new millennium started in 2001, but most people weren’t prepared to wait a year. Whatever, I had bought two Expedition Touring bikes from Thorn Cycles, took them to Sri Lanka with me and Anne & I undertook a three week bike tour of as much as the island as was accessible at that time.
My own 2000 audax randonneur season effectively ran from February to August during which I rode 14 200s, three 300s, two 400s, two 500s and one 600 to give me another SR and 65 points for Randonneur 5,000. (Several 500km events were run that year so many of us were able to qualify as ‘SR 2000’ as a one-off for that year.) This brought my tally over a decade of Audax riding to 913 points and 27 SRs. I was also a member of the winning Cardiff Byways Summer Arrow team to give me an eighth consecutive year in the AUK Hall of Fame.
Anne had been planning to extend her two years VSO in Sri Lanka until the end of the year, after which we were planning to undertake a cycling tour in southern India with our Expedition bikes, but in August Anne was effectively evacuated from Sri Lanka as a medical emergency. This was the result of a form of breakdown and the start of a mental illness which left her in a state of considerable anxiety and among other things virtually prevented her from riding her bike at all for some time after this. After some years this was diagnosed a bi-polar disorder for which Anne now receives proper effective treatment and takes medication to control. In recent years Anne has returned to riding some Audax again and even successfully completed PBP for the third time with myself and five other Cardiff Byways members in 2007.