Woman cycles 7,000 miles to honour her father
MND AssociationA woman has cycled 6,835 miles (11,000 km) from Portugal to Norway to raise awareness of motor neurone disease (MND) and to honour her father.
Claire McCombe, 67, from Northamptonshire, set off on her bike, which she has named Margaret, and finished her journey 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
Her father Cyril died from MND and she said he had passed on his sense of adventure to her.
"People's hearts are so large. You just knock on a door and ask for water and then people will end up offering food, cups of tea, rooms for the night," she said.
MND AssociationMcCombe said she noticed something was wrong with her father when he tripped while walking in Devon. He started dragging his foot which he believed was a trapped nerve.
"My dad was a climber, a mountaineer, a cyclist and he really inspired my love of the outdoors," she said.
She said she undertook the challenge "to help research because there is no cure".
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Broadly following the EuroVelo 1 Atlantic Coast route, her journey, which she has recounted on Facebook, started in Valenca in north-west Portugal, headed down the coast to south-west Spain and then up through the Basque country, the west coast of France, south-west England, south Wales, Ireland, Scotland, a ferry from Aberdeen to Bergen and finished at Norway's most-northen point of Nordkapp.
She knocked on the door of a family in Norway who were all affected by a genetic condition, not MND, and had not engaged with the outside world for four years.
She told BBC Radio Northampton's Annabel Amos: "I had a cup of tea with them and started talking about motor neurone disease.
"As a result, they felt they could now go out and talk about their condition.
"They said it had been life changing that I'd just knocked on their door."
Carmen Brown, from the Northampton-based MND Association, said the condition was "absolutely ruthless" and that six people were diagnosed with it in the UK every day.
"What they [the fundraisers] do each day is phenomenal, so we can get to that cure sooner, we haven't got the time to wait."
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