Saturday 12 January 2013

the less than -1 in the foot area ride

I heard late yesterday that Dan and his buddies were planning a purely road ride towards feckenham and that there'd be a mix of MTB and road bikes. Thinking i might just be able to keep up I muscled my way in!, thanks for the invite Dan!
As i lay in bed this morning listening to the rain I planned what to wear, it came as a bit of a shock when i looked out of the window and saw it was snowing! The ride was still on though and fully waterproofed up i met the other lads and headed off into the deluge. We coped with rain, snow, brown water puddles of unknown depth (thankfully only up to the axles at one point) and as luck would have it Feckenham, the half way point, has a general store/cafe. it was definately "local" I'm not sure they had experienced 5 riders looking for cake and coffee all at once, the lovely lady behind the counter looked a bit stunned but managed to pull it together and after a bit of a delay were all scoffing some actually quite delicious home made delicacies. Then, back on the road with no real improvement in the weather we circled back towards home. My usual bugbear reared it head as my feet were freezing, one of the guys has a thermometer on his GPS which read -1 degrees Celsius (around 32F US readers!) It felt less than -1 in the foot area!
My choice of bike might not have been the best as it's quite low geared and that's the excuse I'm using for not being near the front! although a 32:16 mtb didn't seem to slow Dan down at all.
So, a very wet, very cold ride in the depths of a northern European winter which had the potential to be really grim, but it was just the opposite, everyone made me feel very welcome and i really enjoyed it, cheers guys, hope i can come again.
ride 3
23 miles
total 64

1 comment:

Deadly Dan said...

Great to ride with you again, maybe we can do it a bit more often now we are "training"!