A bonus ride that I never thought I would get in today! Woke up to the dreadful weather that was passing through, with heavy rain and winds strong enough to topple a 4 ft stone pinnacle from a church in Shrewsbury and half a tree at work, that blocked the fire escape!
As the day went on the weather got slowly better and when I finished a work meeting early, not far from where i live, I decided sod going back to work, I'm going out for a ride
There was hardly a cloud in the sky and little or no wind and so I decided on shorts and a jacket and it was the perfect choice, with warmth in the sun still there!
The ride started out very annoyingly though. I had been riding for about 1 minute and came to the point where I needed to cross the main road into the estate. There is not a pelican crossing, but there is a refuge in the middle of the road, with dropped kerbs and it is a 30 mph limited road that often queues way back. Today was no different and as I reached the crossing point the cars were moving about 1 car length at a time. 1 car moved just past the crossing and so the ideal thing for the woman in the silver roller skate (sorry Toyota Aygo) to do would have been to let me cross, but oh no, she looked at me as she decided to speed up, almost stuff her car up the back end of the one in front and completely block my path. I was bloody seething and so squeezed my bike around the back of her car and onto the central refuge. She was still not going anywhere and so I stood there at her window and gave her a loud volley of my thoughts, something along the lines of her being an ignorant cow who needs to open her eyes. She purposely refused to make eye contact with me, as she knew she was in the wrong and so I parted with a few more choice words and cycled through the estate. She must have a miserable life having to live with being such a stupid cow
I headed down to the old canal path, which was a bit dicey due to the wind having brought loads of leaves down and the rain having turned them into a carpet of mulch
Incident avoided I continued to Uffington and Upton Magna, climbed up Haughmond Hill and down the lovely Somerwood straight, into Rodington.
I had a quick stop to put my lights on, due to the sun getting low in the sky and pressed on to Longdon on Tern and Isombridge. There was a fair bit of water on the lanes around there and a wide load has been down there, churning up the verges and so it was a muddy mess which wasn't particularly pleasant.
It got better again as I cruised to Withington, Upton Magna and retraced my steps home.
Despite the anger at the start of the ride I did enjoy it and it took me past 1500 miles on the bike this year.
20.5 miles at 12.6mph avg
I think we will be using more pubs for lunch in the future. Really nice day not to bumpy, We had the normal pub stop at the end of the ride, i did sink a couple of pints.
).
.Otherwise everything else is hunky dory and all this cycling hasn't affected my psa levels and cholesterol,sugar and other things are all going down so I enjoyed the bottle red with the other half last night even more.
