Saturday's Ride (a good one btw)
Just back from a 2 day mini-tour over the weekend on our off-road touring bikes in anticipation of next weekend's start from John O'Groats. Needed to test the bikes (make sure I reassembled them correctly
(I stripped them down over the last month, cleaned, replaced parts and generally serviced them, including oil changes for the Rohloff hubs)). The bikes faired much better than the riders by the 2nd day. Saturday it was even stevens, but Sunday was seriously hard work.
Ready for the off.
Testing out the new clickstands to prop the bikes up - they work really well and are amazingly light coming around 75g each. They also can strap onto the seat post/stay which is not shown in this picture.
So we set off in sunshine from home (and I rememberd to put on sunblock thankfully), with a reasonably light load but with tent & sleeping bag/mats etc to camp on my in-laws lawn to test the new tent out. Setting out from home on the tourers was odd to say the least, but the gearing made the local climb out of our lane much easier than other bikes, then it was a case of following the route I had plotted into my Garmin Edge 200 to cycle roughly to Failsworth near to Oldham from the Delamere area. I had planned to follow some of the back roads around here that I road earlier in the week and they were great. One thing we both noticed instantly is how much extra room we got given being on the tourers (actually expedition bike or off-road tourers, so think mtb design in steel with a rohloff hub and weighing around 22kg unladen!). Drivers tend to realise how much damage you will do to their vehicle with panniers on and give loads more space.
The journey progressed well, lunch at the side of a small lane and then onwards on a mystery tour of greater manchester using off-road trails, national cycle routes and roads. Some my OH knew, most he did not - which is odd because Manchester is his home 'city' being from Failsworth but Garmin has the habit of prefering quiet roads and sometimes the 'diversions' are interesting to say the least. One such diversion had us going up a road that was meant to meet another lane and well, it didn't. Regretfully this was after a short hard climb up the side of a resovoir... the resulting diversion was intersting because it was a turn around, and try again, getting lost in a housing estate, repeating another hill climb, knowing we had to go off left, but the only next left turned out to be a motorway junction, so we had to carry on in totally the wrong direction heading towards Glossop!
No go - Garmin routed us through here. Both Garmin and Google show this as a road, as did my open source maps, but the
Ordnance Survey does not, shame I did not double check with the OS...
A quick stop in a petrol station confirmed our only option (we were cycling up the A57 at this point) and leaving the petrol station we had what was probably the most considerate driver of the day - and from his actions probably a cyclist as well. He held back creating a gap in the constant stream of traffic, flashed us out of the garage and held back until the lights changed at the top of the hill. He got a very big thankyou and thumbs up.
Then we had some climbing to do. Getting to within 3 miles of Glossop means only one thing - the edge of the Pennies and there was a long climb up the hill from where we turned off to get to Staylebridge. But with it being a major route, it was a constant gradient and it was simply a case of putting the 5th gear (out of 14) and plodding our way to the top. Coming down the otherside was great fun though we failed to trigger the speed camera in the 30mph zone, only managing 30mph! Shame I even pedalled that little bit harder as well to try to trigger it. From there we picked up yet another off-road route that my OH didn't know existed. It is great fun getting him lost only a few miles from where he grew up! Another old railway, but this time we had an issue depiste it being a national cycle route, the usual bike barricades of the handle bar wiggle type we simply too narrow to get our handlebars through and the bikes had to be picked up and carried over the 'horse hurdles' instead.
Off-road section, a nice quiet old railway somewhere in the Greater Manchester area - possibly!
We set out at 10:10am, arrived at 5pm and were exceptionally happy, having had a really good day of sunshine, but hit some nasty headwinds towards the end as we swung round to head west, a sign of what was to come on Sunday. 81.2km (somewhere around 50 miles).
The night was spent in the new tent on the lawn - I wanted my OH to sleep in it so he could decide which tent he was going to carry for the 2 weeks camping on John O'Groats to home (that well known long distance route!).
(Sunday will follow tomorrow...)
http://www.strava.com/activities/78950871
Unfortuantly I missed the strava 750km in a month badge by 6km, but I have covered 347km this last week (or 215 miles). I did think about going back out, but Failsworth is not somewhere I want to cycle around on an expensive bike when we had failed to bring any locks with us (!) and cycling into Oldham involved a hill I had no wish to cycle unnecessarily so I baled on the badge!
Not knowing what the state of the road was like I used the knockabout bike, reasoning that the fatter tyres might be better if the surface wasn't great.
). From this side it isn't especially steep but just seems to go on for ever. I saw a few other riders, one who overtook early in the climb (much lighter bike) but didn't seem to be pulling away that quick when the gradient ramped up (not necessarily fitter 
) The others were headed down hill when I was stopped at the side and were good enough to ask if I was okay.
(I was - just a drink/photo stop).
The worst thing about this climb was the flies - I had to pull the buff down over my ears to keep them off.
It lifted the overall average a bit but not a huge amount.
All in all a most enjoyable ride.
Had a good ride and here are the photo's .....normal service has returned !
