So yeah, 'Wowbagger's Folly' indeed. Day 2 started off with a mission to Bridgnorth in search of an optiquack for emergency fettling of Wowbagger's glasses, which seem not to be rated for hills or something. On the basis of time lost doing that, and on account of the previous day's average speed, I proposed we deviated from the original route and take the much flatter B4368 from Morville to Craven Arms. With hindsight this was an excellent plan, especially in light of the fact that it took us slightly over 4 hours to cover 29km(!). I think it came down to Wow not being rated for fully-loaded climbs (though he keeps plodding admirably well) and Jan not being rated for atrocious headwind or much in the way of breathing. Much use was made of the 24" gear, and there were a tremendous amount of stoppages.
By the time we got to Craven Arms, I was beginning to suffer from Knees, and opted to perform a Larrington Manoeuvre to Bishop's Castle via the B4368/B4385 at my own pace (and therefore preferred cadence), rather than the glacial attempt on the up-and-over route that we had planned. This got me to Bishop's Castle in reasonable time, and after taking on ballast at Spar, I winched my way up to the highly defensible Foxholes campsite, which as luck would have it was hosting a Vango Tempest 200 owners' convention.
Sensing my general weariness, and on being informed that the rest of my group were at least an hour behind, the owner suggested that we pitch at the bottom of the 'Yurt Field', which was notable for its absence of yurts, as well as the lack of DoE expeditions.
The Wows turned up some time later, after I'd pitched, showered, walked the site to perform a rudimentary GSM survey and started cooking. This was around the time that I discovered that one of the multiple horsefly bites sustained the previous day had gone distinctly nasty. More of that later.
Sunday began with a generous helping of annoying rain, so I packed up what I could without leaving the tent, and withdrew to the campers' lounge place thingy to nibble some breakfast, via the facilities. After about half an hour the rain had subsided, the DoE kids who'd had roughly the same idea that I'd been chatting to had noticed their teacher's tent was down and got their kit organised, and the Wows were mostly packed.
The plan was simple: Kerry Ridgeway to Newtown, or "Down the hill, turn right, keep climbing until you die." That's more or less what we did, albeit extremely slowly. I'm also assured that hill reps count double when you do them on somebody else's bike. After a long while we more or less ran out of up, and the comedy off-roading began: Reasonable hardpacked grit interspersed with lumps of slippery slate for the most part, not helped by an extremely moist (ie. we were riding through the cloud) crosswind. Deano wasn't present to tell us it was downhill all the way to Newtown, when we re-joined the tarmac roads, but the principle was the same. Around the same time the cloud dissipated, it warmed up and the view appeared...
After some rather good descending, we arrived in Kerry, where I discovered that great novelty only usually found in tourist areas: a clean, open public toilet with plentiful supplies of bog roll. After making use of that the idea of abandoning the rest of the day's ride, perhaps by means of a taxi, was discussed. In light of what was to come, that seemed eminently sensible. I pressed on to Newtown and ate some food at the roadside while the Wows caught up; if I wanted to complete the day's route on my own in a reasonable time I'd have to resort to audax low-faff tactics.
On that basis I handed over the items we'd earlier transferred from Jan's bike to mine, and set a course for Llanidloes. An uneventful ~25km of Bastard Headwind later, I reached the Spar and stocked up on Frijj and biscuits (but didn't collect a receipt). Unfortunately this was a tactical error, as by the time I reached the next control at Llangurig I was way out of time
[1]. It would have to be emergency Supernoodles and semi-molten chocolate for tea. I was also having trouble with one of my horsefly bites, which had developed a spectacular welt directly under the seam of my shorts.
After Llangurig, the route rapidly takes a turn for the gravitational. Photos never do this sort of thing justice, but:
I was just able to winch myself up it, with several gratuitous lung breaks. Fortunately I didn't meet any motor vehicles coming the other way.
After the first 100m of climbing the road evens out, and becomes a long, steady climb up through the forest (and recently removed forest). I enjoyed this part immensely - it started to feel really remote, the dense pine trees gave shelter from the wind and the warm, humid evening air with a notable reduction of allergen content was ideal for cycling. Eventually I reached the top:
(Looking back towards Llangurig)Rounding the bend, the cellular signal abruptly vanished and the view ahead became even more spectacular:
This is evidently where they hide wind turbines so the NIMBYs don't complain about them. What I didn't appreciate at this point was that the road rising out of the valley in the distance was the continuation of the track. But first some serious brake-cooking descending - no chance of letting it go with the kamikaze sheep and strong crosswind. A very short time later I was down in the valley...
...and confronted with this:
What the photo doesn't show is the surface. It's what you get if you take a perfectly good single-track tarmac road, run occasional heavy farm traffic along it for years, and do nothing in the way of maintenance beyond filling the potholes with ballast as they appear. The end result being a loose ballast-and-slate path, with a narrow ridge of mostly intact tarmac down the middle. Combine that with gradients that would merit multiple chevrons if only the road qualified, and it was more than a bit tricky. It was tricky on the way down, too - not helped by the sunbathing sheep, and occasional large gap in the tarmac strip.
The bottom of the path was, thankfully, just round the corner from the Tyllwyd campsite, where I was made welcome and under-charged because "you're just on a bike". I thanked the proprietor, complimented them on their spectacular hill and went to do battle with the midges, who were drawn magnetically to my soggy tent. I showered, changed into clean body-covering clothes and deployed the 100% DEET. Combined with the fumes from the trangia this kept the bite rate down to an acceptable level for about 5 minutes, by which point I'd had enough and holed up in the tent with a book and a tube of hydrocortisone cream until nightfall.
A couple of hours later, as I reached that point of falling asleep where you're still barely conscious but have no control of your body, a previously noted large sheep - channelling the spirit of Brillo The Ram - sneaked up on the other side of the fence next to my tent and without warning emitted the deepest most bellowing "BAAA!" I've ever experienced. This naturally resulted in a spectacular whole-body spasm, of the kind that means you're wide awake for the next 20 minutes. Which is about how long it took for the sheep to follow my strongly worded advice and wader off.
I don't have any pictures of the campsite, because I was being eaten by beasties. Suffice to say that it's a lovely riverside site, with decent facilities, in the land that GSM forgot. Best visited at the end of April, or something.
This morning, fortified by the remaining half a packet of biscuits and a large dose of Piriton, I set off for Aberystwyth, via the planned B-road route. Unsurprisingly, this involved a few short nasty ups, but the net elevation loss was notable, and I made reasonable time. My phone made contact with the outside world on the final descent towards Aberystwyth, and received an SMS from Wowbagger, asking how I was doing and saying that they were at the harbour. I found my way to the harbour and there they were.
Lunch was had on the sea front (I was, by this point, craving sausages), and we set off for the station in good time for my train. The Wows were on a later train, as bike spaces are limited. The journey back to Birmingham was uneventful, other than the steady decrease in air quality.
[1] Ie. The only shop was closed on account of it being a Sunday 
