the Moors Valley Park ride

the Moors Valley Park ride, a photo by rOcKeTdOgUk on Flickr.

went on a brief visit to Dorset to the Poole area, i've been loads of times and had used the routes fom the caravan many times and needed something new, happily the local council have produced a series of maps showing all the cycle friendly roads, bridleways "footpaths you should push your bicycle" and paths open to all traffic which enabled me to plot a route to Moors Valley park which advertises waymarked bike trails through their woods. the surounding area is very flat and a lot of the of road routes are on disused and converted railway tracks so are even flatter! this makes for a lot of pedaling without the respite of some downhills to recover on. the route to the park was very straightforward and we only had to cross one busy road and that even had a pelican crossing. we also passed through the edge of Ringwood forest, there were a lot of tempting looking trails off the main route but we stuck to our guns and resisted. the park was very busy, with a "go ape", a steam train and waymarked walks as well as bike trails it's understandable. the 7k bike trail at first seemed a bit disappointing, quite twisty but there were rocks on every outside edge of the corners, i can understand rocks on the inside to stop corne cutting but on the outside seemed to ruin the flow, in the event i found going faster and having to avoid hitting the rocks made the trail more of a challenge and it was quite fun. once completed we retraced our route and had a pub stop on the way back, a great day out in lovely sunshine resulting in very dusty bikes
ride 87
27 miles
total 1435
commute 758
total+commute 2193