Paul Arnold, a retired DJ aged 37, swam to the Isle of Wight from the south coast last month. He crossed the choppy shipping channel, together with 10 other hardy souls, earning him a free ticket to the island’s most eccentric music festival, and a pot of cash for charity.

Arriving at the Bestival in goggles and flippers would hardly have stood Arnold out from the crowd. The festival is a giant fancy dress party with music, world food, arts, reflexology and lashings of cider.

Of course, the easiest way to get there is by train or car, via a ferry hop across the Solent, but in the spirit of Bestival peculiarity, I wanted to get there under my own steam. That’s how the South Downs Way cycle came to fruition.

I’m not one for sea swimming - too much seaweed and sewage. Short of taking the full week off work and walking to Southampton to catch the ferry, or embarking on a couple of back-to-back marathons, cycling was the best option.

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It had its advantages – I’d be burning a few calories before the usual festival binge, and could breeze past the traffic jams that taint the end of a festival experience.

Another bonus I had not counted on was the skipping the queue at the Red Funnel ferry terminal.

We arrived flustered and sweating in Southampton with just seven minute’s to go before our ferry was due to depart. There was no way we were getting on – a queue of biblical proportions snaked around the car park, through the ticket office and out the other side.

We duly joined the bubbly crowd and decamped onto the pavement. But then, just moments from unpacking Travel Scrabble I saw a cyclist glide past the terminal and skip through the queuing cars to the front of the car lanes. It would appear that when it comes to ferry passengers, bicycles are VIPs.

Within a few minutes we were boarded, had clinched the best seats on the ferry, and were smugly watching the scramble for seats as we sat back to Travel Scrabble and a plate of chips.

Now, I wouldn’t normally eat chips as a mid-afternoon snack, but this was an exception. We’d just cycled for around eight hours across country, some 50-odd miles from Midhurst in Sussex. It was a good three hours over our estimate and not the pretty country peddle we’d anticipated.

Planning the route wasn’t as easy as we’d envisaged either. I hope to be corrected on this, but 100-or-so cycling websites later and we were no closer to finding a tool to get us from A to B. I wanted quiet roads or paths, not wobbling between Little Chefs in the shadow of rumbling articulated lorries on the A31.

Pretty soon it was clear we weren’t going to find a bucolic route between London and Southampton, so the best bet was a train to somewhere on the South Downs Way, from where my husband and I would cycle to Winchester and drop down through pretty Hampshire villages to Southampton.

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