I set out to do a DIY300 yesterday but it ended up as a completely different ride, so I'm writing it up here not in the audax board. I'd planned a route out to Chippenham then on tracks through Calne and Cherhill to Avebury. From there I would continue eastward, but mainly on roads, as far as a place called Halfway, which is on the A4 halfway between Hungerford and Newbury – or between Bristol and London, if you look at the bigger picture. Then up through Wantage, over the Thames west of Oxford and up to Charlbury before heading south through Brize Norton then west via Lechlade and Tetbury then down into Bristol. Things started going wrong before I'd even got on the bike; I was just lifting it through the door when my back seized solid. I seemed to have done something nasty to a muscle or tendon in my left shoulder. Not had that happen before, but I diagnosed that cycling would be good for it, and my diagnosis was correct.
So, on the bike and away. But before I'd even got out of Bristol, my left foot felt wrong. I adjusted the cleat position and that seemed to help. And my front mudguard was wobbling and rubbing on the tyre. More of that later. Heavy traffic in Chippenham then I was out on the cycle track, which I think is an old railway line. It can get pretty muddy there but yesterday it was decently dry. Then there's the narrow, brambly bit round the quarry to Cherhill, through the village and more tracks, but over fields, taking you into the back of Avebury. Avebury was full of a thousand neo-hippies, anarchists, pagans out to celebrate the solstice, many of them wrapped up in stripy blankets despite the heat, while others were shirtless. Also present were several groups of what might be described as middle-class middle-aged wannabe-hippies – hipster hippies, perhaps – some also sporting stripy blankets, but fashioned into "ethnic" style garments. Along with a few bemused East Asian tourists. And me! From Avebury a blat along the A4, nice and rolling, into Marlborough, where I stopped for tea, cake and a toastie. Then back roads to Hungerford and along parallel to the A4 but the other side of the canal, till I joined the A4 just short of Halfway.
Halfway is a place – it's not even a village, just a pub and one or two houses – named for being halfway between Hungerford and Newbury. It first appeared as a coaching inn, where coaches would change horses, and somehow survived into the twenty-first century. Here I stopped to take a photo – and noticed that my headlight was askew. Closer inspection revealed that it had been knocked out of alignment by the brake cables I'd tucked behind it when I was de-wobbling the mudguard, and more importantly, this had ripped the dynamo wiring out of the headlight. The terminals were still attached to the headlight and firmly closed but the wires were loose. No way I could get them back in. Also no way I was going to complete a 300 in daylight, even on the longest day. Obviously the audacious thing would have been to cut some strands from a barbed wire fence to make new cable, then forage in the bins of the Halfway pub for an old coke can which I would fashion into terminals before crimping the whole ensemble with my teeth. Job done and who needs a bike shop! However, I guess I just wasn't in the right frame of my mind, or as the old folks like to put, my head wasn't in the right space, so I looked for an alternative route that would get me home before dark.
There were three options: I could retrace what I'd ridden, I could head straight west along the A4 or I could carry on in the planned northward direction for a while before heading homeward. The last was by far the most attractive, so I found myself riding along the B4000 (pretty cool number, I reckon) towards Lambourn. A nice Roman road, straight but not Kansas, not flat but not hilly, very smoothly surfaced. Plenty of good scenery especially to the left and ahead. Not much traffic. Got into Lambourn ("Home of the Racehorse") and thought an ice cream would be a good idea, so went into the Co-op. Selected a Feast (because what is an ice cream on a stick if it doesn't remind you of being 12?) and then saw a man wearing a T-shirt with the logo "Forecast for the weekend: Camping with a high chance of cider." Well, I was camping two weekends ago but I didn't have any cider – I prefer beer! So I got a beer as well. Ate the ice cream outside the shop and rode off towards Shrivenham then up a byway where I drank the beer. If you're going to abandon an audax, abandon it with style. Or do I mean abandon all style? It's both good and dangerous to have a key ring with a bottle opener built in; luckily the 25% rule prevents overindulgence on an actual audax. (And in case you're wondering, I did not leave the empty bottle there – I jammed the top back on, having rinsed it out in case it leaked anyway, and took it off in my rack pack.)
Nothing much to report about the rest of the ride. I reached some crazy speed on the big descent into Shrivenham and hit a hole which might have been nasty with narrower tyres but was merely a jolt with the big 42s, meandered through Highworth and into Purton, where Mr Kipling's finest bakewell tarts were consumed (I'm sorry, Mr Kipling, but they weren't really that fine; you should have stuck to the writing). And onwards to home, arriving back just after the streetlights came on. Well timed in the end!
