That was an excellent ride.
I left Southend in rather nasty weather which was rather better in London and a lot kinder in Somerset - to start with. TimO and I met on the train and were joined at our table by two Chinese girls, whose reservations took them to Reading. I noticed that they were eating
Fuku products, with evident enjoyment.
Our train change at Bath was OK and we followed the Avon, a stretch of track on which I have never travelled before. It was very picturesque and demands a camping tour one day. Hilly though! We arrived at Castle Cary, were joined shortly by Rower40 and a bit less shortly by Pippa & Jurek. We set off along an amended route dreamed up by Rower, and it was most creative. Firstly we took a road of which OSM seemed completely ignorant but this then followed exactly, for some of the time, a bridleway. It became a concrete track, where some young bovines politely stood to one side as we barged through (those two townies Pippa and Jurek were concerned that they might become victims of the carnivorous habits of a hungry cow) but we survived that and then had to ride through rough pasture. There was little sign of a path save a fairly vague notice pointing to a "Public Right of Way". Soon this joined another road of which OSM was unaware (I suspect that if we had stayed on the first road and avoided the bridleway it would have taken us to exactly the same place) but then rejoined the original route, having shortened it by a mile or two and lengthened it by about 20 minutes.
The Tor loomed larger as we approached and we took some photographs, but I was surprised how little of that route I remembered from last year. The curry house was exactly where we left it, though, and we were accommodated at a table for 5, after which the place was pretty well full. It was fairly pricey, but the meals were very good.
Rower and I climbed the Tor, I took a load of photographs, the others stayed half-way down, we had a brew and watched a rather playful young Weimaraner intimidate a couple of small children until its owner called it from some distance away. The dog hurtled down the hill, seemingly almost leaving its gonads behind in its haste to please its master. We received a textual badger report (high risk of badgers in the Glastonbury area) from Delthebike and after a bit of lights faffing off we went.
Strangely, we saw no live badgers at all, even though we were on the same road at roughly the same time as we were last year. My phone rang and, given the imminence of grandparenthood, I answered it but it was the other daughter, who hadn't given birth either.
Our progress was pretty rapid until we left the levels and started to climb. Once again, some of the road junctions were floodlit, bore "ROAD CLOSED" signs and were manned by burly types in bulging fluorescent jackets. When it came to taking the "closed" road that was on our route, Rower started to engage these bouncers in conversation, trying to reason with them, but it was clear that they were not going to let us through. I announced that this was our road and we were going that way come what may, rode through the cones and of course nothing happened. The others followed. It does, however, annoy me enormously that some private individual is given dispensation by somebody in authority (assuming he is - last year the bouncers were unable to say on whose authority the road was closed) to close public roads in order to protect his private event (the Glastonbury Festival) form potential gatecrashers.
Mostly our progress was along dark and deserted roads. However, every so often we came across some event or other: a ceilidh near a church, a noisy party in a large garden and, most interestingly, a front room with open curtains and about a dozen people sitting around a table, well after midnight. We speculated that it was a coven of witches and at one point we were certain that Jurek had been turned into a newt, but he got better.
There was one monster climb which took us to well over 200 metres above sea level (the Garmin registered about 780') and as last year, owls were heard. We endured a fairly long descent, and it was an endurance test as, keeping up speeds in excess of 15 mph for long periods whilst dropping into icy air does nothing for the comfort of the hands, especially when one took the executive decision that warm gloves would not be necessary because this is the middle of summer, isn't it, and summer is warm. At about 3 a.m. we stopped for a brew (last year we had a number of "visits", but their absence this year put us well ahead of the clock) but but was after this that my hands became painfully cold. Pippa gave me a pair of latex gloves, which provided some small protection from the wind, but not enough, and I found a polythene bag in my luggage and put that on my right hand, the open end being "sealed" around my cuff with a curly fluorescent thing from TimO. This helped a lot and I spent a good deal of time with just my right hand on the bars, my left had tucked somewhere warm.
As we came out of the Wylye valley, we tended to warm up, partly through the extra effort needed and partly because we were moving out of the frost pocket. I don't think the temperature dropped below freezing but it couldn't have been much above, most vicious for a June night. I spent a few minutes just as we reached the A36 trying to move my fingers around to get some life back into them.
This year there was no sound of machine-gun fire wafting up form the Imber area and, more encouragingly, no flags flying and none of the deep-pitched menace of manoeuvring tanks. After a quick trip to look at the stones, which we could only view from the road, we set off across Lark Hill to the appointed breakfast spot some 6 miles of roughstuff away. It was along this stretch of road that the fatigue really hit me and there were times when I could feel myself drifting off. Somehow the bike remained upright and its wheels skilfully avoided the worst of the pot-holes. There were many skylarks, quite a few whitethroats and on three occasions I heard grasshopper warblers.
We breakfasted well: smoked salmon, bacon, porridge, tea. I made use of the precariously positioned Portaloo, which rocked violently with every motion I made, and soon we were on our way for the last 10 miles or so of the ride, across the Vale of the White Horse. We passed the place where I mended last year's puncture and arrived at the station well over an hour before our train did. By this time the sun was trying to come through and we spread ourselves out and slept. When I awoke I noticed in an adjacent field a horse which was wearing what for all the world looked like a gimp mask.
On arrival back in London, Pippa, Jurek and I headed for the East End, and we parted company just as I took the turning for Fenchurch Street whereas they carried on to Canary Wharf.
