A man of your calibre could find those 13 miles - circuits in Manchester or ride back from Littleborough.
After all, this is the same Colin who did seemingly endless circuits in Scarborough to make up the ton - in the rain.
Circuits of Manchester at 22:00 on a Saturday night - I would not really be keen on 13 miles worth of 'dodge the drunks'!
The short ride from Piccadilly to Victoria was exciting enough with staggering young pedestrians either not noticing or not caring that I was heading down the road towards them.
It's a pity that there wasn't a safe quiet loop to do in Manchester city centre because I had 50 minutes to wait at Victoria and could have got most of those miles in before my train left, then got off at Walsden to get the last couple in. Mind you, rain had finally arrived after a nice sunny day when, yes, I DID have to remove my armwarmers and long-sleeved base layer. I was cold and tired by the time I got back over here and didn't fancy trudging round the local roads in the rain until gone midnight. The next ton+ can wait until my Cheshire forum ride in 2 weeks time.
Speaking of my forum ride [
HINT] ... Anybody who did this ride (but also anybody who did NOT) is welcome to join us for that one on June 2nd. 200 km from Manchester Victoria railway station, or 100 miles from the big old oak tree at the junction in Dunham. The ride from Manchester to Cheshire is a short trip from Victoria to Piccadilly then nickyboy's route to Dunham.
I'm at Llandudno Junction, train arrives in 10 minutes.
Things not to say just before you leave a cafe/pub/whatever; "This is when I find I have a puncture."
It is also the thing not to say when you have got lost on the hills above Flint, are watching the time, and thinking it might be a bit tight getting to Llandudno! I punctured just before descending to Rhyl and that put me off even attempting the last bit of the ride.
Just left Llandudno Junction on the rail replacement bus. One of the coaches loaded three bicycles.
I meant to point out to Andrew before the ride that the train from Llandudno station (not too far from the chip shop) goes through Llandudno Junction (a further 3 miles or so by road) so there isn't any point in going to the latter, unless your digs happen to have been closer to that than the main station.
Just woken up this morning, still a bit tired but otherwise good.
Did you get your 300 km in, or even the double imperial century?
History repeated itself ,we lost again IIT must be me .
I didn't help ... (See below!) Just remember what I said about using GPS on your phone though - it uses satellite data not your the phone signal so it will not eat any of your data allowance. That assumes that you have preloaded whatever maps you are using before you left home. If you are worried about your battery life, you could carry one of those powerbanks for recharging the phone. Aldi and Lidl do them pretty regularly for under £10.
I prefer using a separate GPS. The problem yesterday was that I had intended to do the flatter route so I hadn't downloaded the hilly version to my device. My GPS can only cope with simplified files (about 500 points) so it would not have helped me to download nickyboy's original while I was out because it had thousands of points in it. I edit other people's routes on my laptop to get them down to less than 500 points.
The other problem yesterday was that one of the 2 NiMH AA batteries in my GPS failed as I was riding along. I thought it had behaved slightly strangely when I was charging it for the ride, but stupidly neglected to carry spares.
Cracking day. 105.1 miles to Karden House- took a couple of small detours (unconnected with losing Colin and Ali) and ended up riding the last stretch solo. Never mind, was a great day out.
I've found out where we went wrong! You had stopped after that first ramp but I wanted to press on after I caught you up. I expected you to overtake me shortly afterwards but Ali came up to me by himself. He told me that you were eating an apple so we stopped after the second steep ramp and waited. And waited. And ... eventually Ali left his bike with me and jogged back down the hill to check that you were ok. After about 20 minutes he came back and said that you had gone. We couldn't understand how that had happened unless you had given up and gone back down the hill. What both of us had SOMEHOW done was to complete miss the 2 roads off to the right on the climb, one of which was the official route and presumably how you managed to get past us without us seeing you!
You can see on the map below the official route in purple and where we went, shown in red. The bit where we went off route was where we happened to choose to wait. If we had stopped further up back on the proper route then you would have found us there, and we wouldn't have gone on to get lost. You can see how much further we went on the hills before giving up. The tracklog also shows a few places where we went in completely the wrong direction. We ended up doing at least 3 bonus steep climbs.
We gave up and decided to stick to A-roads to get off the hill. What amazed me was that we didn't see any signs for Prestatyn and only starting seeing them for Rhyl when we had almost got there. It doesn't help to be told that one is heading for Rhuddlan unless one knows that Rhuddlan is on the hill just above Rhyl!
I punctured on the steep drop into Dyserth but couldn't find what had caused the puncture during the usual post mortem. It worried me to put a fresh tube into a suspect tyre but time was getting on so I did, and we carried on. The tyre is still inflated now so I don't know what had happened. I'll take another look at the old tube later.
We gave up and decided to find a chip shop in Rhyl, then go straight to the station. Ali spotted one on the RHS of the road just as we entered the fringes of Rhyl, about 2 km up the hill from the station. The portions
were humungous. We each had large portions of chips and peas, with a 'small' portion of haddock. Well, the small portion of fish was what I would call 'normal' size. The chips and peas were too much for both of us. I hate throwing food away, but even my big appetite couldn't cope. We could easily have shared one large portion of fish, chips and peas.
Anyway, I must try and find the cause of that puncture. I don't think it was a snakebite because I have no recollection of hitting anything that could have caused one.
PS I just double-checked what I did yesterday and with the extra bits to and from stations it was actually 91 miles (~146 km). Frustratingly close to the imperial century, but I still probably would not have done the extra distance even if I had realised last night.
