I rode half a 600 on Saturday. So that's a 300? No! That's not the way audax arithmetic works! My friend Ian (occasionally posting here as IanN) was determined to be certified as a super random nutter. To this end he needed to ride a 600, which is about double anything he's ridden in previous years, so a big step up. He set out on Friday morning and had a pleasant ride to Salisbury then out to Basingstoke, where the attraction is that you can ride on a gravel path across a golf course. Whether this path passes between bunker and green or between 18th and 19th holes I neglected to ask. Cycling, it was fashionable to claim a few years ago, is the new golf, so logically golf must be the old cycling. Ian would be the last person to deny his retro streak, so would he come back converted to putting and chipping, hang up his wheels and ditch the lycra in favour of loud checks? No, he wouldn't. Shimano no longer make golf equipment and he's about to jump for Campagnolo. Instead, he came back with a justified grumble about a
lime green Aston Martin. But that was Friday. On Saturday, having looped home for a shower and at least 45 minutes sleep, he met me at the Banana Bridge (yes, this is a thing) and we looped off for his second loop, my first. He'd actually done 360km on Friday so Saturday was to be only 240km – hence not a 300. We set off in a generally southward direction and immediately outside Long Ashton (twinned with Las Vegas in the audax-verse) saw a man who appeared to hand-scything a field of wheat. Must be for artisanal hand-crafted single-harvester bread, we decided, and this became a theme of the day; the single-bush coffee, single-tree cider (yes, we rode through the Thatcher's orchard in Somerset), and so on, reaching its apogee in the artisanal hand-crafted single-hen scotch egg – which happened to be part of Ian's lunch!
What about all the exciting things before lunch? There was the Flax Bourton Greenway, which is lovely but far too short, and the Somerset Levels, which were full of dragonflies, buzzards, butterflies, pumping stations and even an alpaca. There were the un-level bits around the edges of the Levels, which are not high but surprisingly steep. Then there was Pilton, home of the famous pop festival, past a farmhouse with a big letterbox labelled 'Eavis', and further on some teepee glamping. Then from grey stone to stone so yellow you'd think it had been painted (but it's the natural colour) in Castle Cary (home of the single-hen single-handed egg).
And what better to do after lunch on a scorching hot summer day than visit the English seaside? So we headed off towards Brent Knoll and Bridgwater, where we hoisted our bikes up a set of steps next to a rather rust railway bridge over the River Parrett – or maybe it was the Sedgemoor Drain. But Bridgwater isn't really the seaside so we carried on to Burnham-on-Sea, where the beach pulsed with happy holidaymakers splashing in the warm, clean water and building castles on the golden sand. Actually, all the families and kids had gone home because by now it was after 7 p.m. (I've compressed the timescale a little) and we were in search of sustenance for our continued exploits, so we pressed our way through the throngs of tourists and fishermen that characterise the Somerset coastal towns until we found a small taverna, humble but clean, which served us fish plucked from the nets that day, washed down with scrumpy from the vats of fermenting apples in one of the farms just two miles inland. And all for two shillings. Oh, you're so cynical! Alright, the town was dead. We found a Subway which lured us in with its glowing red
lanterne open sign... the door was locked! So we gesticulated at the manager visible inside, indicating to him that the opening hours painted on the window said he should be open till 9, so why wasn't he opening his doors to two hungry, sweaty, tired, wild-eyed cyclists? And lo! he did. Real audax glamour, opens all the right doors.
Which was great but we still had 80-odd km to go. Good bye to the Levels, though we followed the coast a little more, then struck inland through Banwell and up to Wrington, where for some gratuitious reason we rode up this:
http://www.streetmap.co.uk/idld.srf?X=347597&Y=163427&A=Y&Z=120&lm=1Which is okay during the day, but somehow at night, when you can't see the top, feels intimidating. And the ripply surface on the very steepest section (just before the corner at the top) means your front wheel is always on the point of leaving the ground. After that it was pretty much downhill and then just bash along the main road back into the big bad city. And home. Congratulations to Ian on his super random nutter certifiableness, I was knackered having done less than half his distance!