Well, we had a jolly good time. Left Stowmarket at about 10.10 and rolled up to coffee in Lavenham, next to the Guildhall, at around midday. Even slower than usual because I was suffering with back trouble and kept needing to stretch rather than pedal. The cake was very good, we all had tea rather than coffee, I had a couple of ibuprofen and we set off at about 12.45. After Long Melford the hills began. We crossed the Poohsticks bridge and then climbed and climbed and as we climbed we sang a little song. No we didn't we just kept on pedalling.
It was just as well that the Queen's Head in Hawkedon serves food until 2.30 because it was 2.26 that we arrived. We all decided on sandwiches because the mains would have taken longer to prepare and Mrs. Wow and I were concerned about our return train, at 6.29 from Stowmarket.
We left the pub around 3.30 and almost immediately Auntie Helen had a faerie bite. That took about 15 minutes to fix and I converted my HPX to Shraeder mode. We continued climbing but we didn't quite reach the dizzy heights of 400' - I think 360ish was the limit, because we didn't follow quite the same route as in the Mildenhall ride. There were some absolutely awful road surfaces, but after we started to head east again, they seemed to improve and we had some pleasant stretches of downhill, so much that our moving average on the tandem rose form 7.8 to about 8.4 over a period of 10 miles. We arrived back at Stowmarket station at 6.04.
For 24th, I'll phone the pub to find out what they've got on, and we can book in advance. I really fancied the Venison Wellington but not enough to risk missing the train.
