Evening ride to the sea

With the weather for most of the first week of my Level 3 at Cycle Systems looking grim I wanted to make the most of the nice Monday evening and get at least one ride in. After the course finished for the day around 5 I went to check in and immediately having got into my room locked myself out when I went to get the rest of my stuff, despite having anticipated doing so. Having located the relevant member of staff (and picked up a nice piece of rocky road on the way, although it could have done with some raisins - is that actually the standard recipe?) I finally got going around six, hoping to get to the coast around sunset and ride back along the estuary in the dusk. Managed it, despite a Garmin problem. Nice rolling lanes and then a lovely coast road - particularly beautiful descending into Shaldon. Stopped briefly to look at the strand, and again to send a photo to Darren and Kiera. Minor panic getting back that my light was going to go, but made it to Asda to buy a ridiculous amount of food and then back to Seale-Hayne without getting quite to the end of it.

Today's lesson: REMEMBER TO CHARGE ELECTRONICS AFTER USE - if you're in a rush you won't remember to charge them when you're likely to need them.

Kidderminster - Husky Hall and back

Cycled the route Saturday 17th/Sunday 18th September.

Having been determined to cycle out to Alex's, this ride really taught me a lesson about the value of doing a meaningful a-b route when time is limited and money... less limited than it used to be, anyway. A lesson I should realistically have learnt several months previously cycling through Telford on the way to the Snowdonia trip, if not before. Got halfway there with the decision to take a train to Kidderminster instead of cycling through Birmingham, but even then the first ten miles or so from the station, and the last ten coming in the next day, were not really worth doing (admittedly not helped by deciding to stick on the B4194 out of Bewdley instead of following the mapped route). In future will get a train further out where the cycling is good straight out of the station - Macclesfield into the Peaks the other week really hammered home how nice it can be. An extra hour/£10 takes you as far as Newtown, with the option of leaving the train at Shrewsbury or Welshpool, or staying on, and finding nice loops out from any of these places. But anyway. The ride from the Midlands out that way has been done, the lesson learnt.

That said, generally a lovely ride once the cycling got nice after leaving the B roads and heading up to Stottesdon. First half of the first day slightly marred by forgetting that I'd printed a round route and panicking about covering so much map ground and the lack of pace I seemed to be making as the cognitive dissonance over the discrepancy between how much ground I knew I'd covered and the percentage of the map I'd got through grew. This combined with having had a few pints the night before and not having eaten properly in the morning, along with the general uphill gradient, rendered the climb up to Ditton Priors to go round Brown Clee a bit of a drag, but the stunning descent to Diddlebury made up for it and at Craven Arms I finally got some decent food inside me and realised the mapreading mistake I had made. Realising I was actually on target made a world of difference to my mood and the rest of the ride.

In brief - bumped into Dave and Liz at Bishop's Castle
- lovely ride along the Ridgeway
- made it up to Husky Hall as the sun was setting, too polite to watch it, went and knocked and said hi first... but made it by sundown and sat on the bench looking over the valley very shortly after
- actually made it up to Husky Hall... always worse than you remember it being. Assume I must have got off and pushed at least some of it before? Really, really challenging, especially as it kicks up after the pink cottage
- great ride back until you get back into the outskirts of Stourbridge... apart from the private gated road through the school I couldn't get through. And the horrible bit of road leading up to it
- puncture on the way into Kidderminster, which was pretty grim, and meant that it was getting dark as I got in
- Fish and chips and shandy on the train

All in all, a great couple of days riding... hopefully some lessons learnt, too.