Come rain or shine, every summer we leave our desks and journey across Oxford’s finer drinking establishments. This year’s Le Tour de Farce was held on 11 June [1]. The trip is traditionally done by bike; however, as long as you have a helmet and lights, anything goes. To emphasise this point, Charlotte jokingly suggested rollerblades were also welcome.

The combination of bad weather on the day and my taking Charlotte’s joke a bit too seriously meant our route was shorter than usual, both in miles and in pub count. The latter is, of course, the only measure of distance that matters.

After some modest pre-drinking, we set off from the Statistics Department and turned north towards The Plough. In case you’ve never been, The Plough is located at the turn of a street called The Turn. This street could be more aptly renamed The Steep Downhill. Still, most people made it to the pub in one piece and had a drink as a reward. The less coordinated of us needed a first aid kit and had a drink for the pain. Afterwards we headed to The White Hart of Whytham for dinner and, perhaps more importantly, more beer. We rounded the evening off at The Fishes.

As per tradition, we took lots of pictures. This year Charlotte arranged them into a short video, which you can watch here:

Before I sign off, here is a list of modes of transport employed during Le Tour 2019, ordered by wheel count:

• on foot, and I do mean mostly on one foot
• unicycle; did you know we have one of the fastest UK unicyclists in OPIG? 
• bike, which was by far the most popular mode of transport; I understand this also comes in the “fixie” variety, but I still don’t know what that means
• tandem, i.e. Clare gets to tag along behind Charlotte
• car, which was perhaps cheating a little
• rollerblades, a perfectly safe, fun way to travel around.

[1] I’m pretty sure this makes me the top blog post procrastinator in OPIG. And Garrett didn’t catch me!