It's a lovely day today.
Shame we didn't have that sort of weather yesterday!
As Tim & I went up on the train to Nottingham, we noted that out of one side we got see patchy cloud, whilst the other side had dark, menacing black cloud, and we certainly saw a lot more of that stuff during the day.
After navigating a mix of main roads and cycle paths out of Nottingham in the company of oncemore, we were soon out in the rolling countryside. The first 40 miles to Market Harborough* seemed to go quite quickly, despite the strong headwind. We'd stopped in one village to put on waterproofs, and the owner of the house we stopped at, came out to have a look, and explained he was the former UK importer of Puch bikes who'd brought the first BMX bikes into the UK. So a bit of history to go with the rain. More hills, and we met up with Jonbuoy who accompanied us for a while, and then we were back down to 3 again.
A few more ups and downs and we ended up in Market Harborough. Seeing as we were waiting for Teethgrinder to arrive at the MacDonalds, we forced ourselves to eat there, and TG rolled up just as we were finishing up. By this time it had brightened up, with even a bit of sunshine, so I ended up taking my jacket off as I was getting too warm. This whole section is full of some really nice countryside, with rolling hills, and we passed lots of fields with lots of little lambs. On any steep hills, the wind though was really having an effect, and I could tell I was slowing up a bit, so by the time we got to Olney I was ready for some food.
Of course, by the time we got outside it had started raining quite heavily. The A509 had been my only concern on this trip due to it being not particularly wide, and with the volume of traffic and the rain it wasn't much fun, although I went slightly wrong with a little diversion through Sherrington, which added ½ mile to the trip. The next section I'd been over only the last weekend and it stopped raining, which made a change. We stopped at the Tesco's in Flitwick to get some more food and drink and headed off again to find it started raining again.
Teethgrinder left us in Barton-Le-Clay just before 6pm and we then moved off into the dusk, skirting round Luton. At this stage, it would have been quite tempting to head off home, but I was feeling quite good, the wind had started to drop and just as I was thinking we were making fairly good time overall and might make it to London around 9 pm and how lucky it was we hadn't got any mechanical problems, I felt my rear tyre going a bit spongy. After removing the offending bit of glass and using Tim's hi-tech pump, we were off on the back roads towards St Albans. Although I know this section fairly well, it's a complete rabbits warren of
little lanes and of course by night, everything looks different, so we had to make a number of stops to check the map and Tim's GPS.
Just north of the South Mimms services, Tim suffered his puncture, which of course was also the rear one - I hate to think how black your hands got. Anyway, once that was fixed we then followed the A1000 south, which Adamski knew well, and then the A1 for a bit, where I was surprised to learn the speed limit was 30 mph - doesn't London have speed cameras?? Traffic was zooming along! Anyway, we dropped down through Camden, and got to St Pancras just after 10.30. After Tim & Adamski headed off, I discovered the fast East Midlands trains weren't running, although there weren't any announcements, and there was only 1 slow Thameslink train. It wasn't until I arrived back at Luton just after midnight, that I saw an announcement on the screens saying there'd been an incident with someone hit by a train at Harpenden - why couldn't they explain the reason for the delays at St Pancras?
Anyway, I got back home having done 145 for the day in 10½ hours of cycling, although the moving average on the Nottingham stretch was only 13.6 mph. However, considering the constant headwind of 15 mph we had for most of the trip, that wasn't too bad. Surprisingly, I didn't feel too tired and nothing ached anywhere.
In spring, on a wet & windy day, this was a good day out. During the summer on a lovely warm sunny day, it will be even better.
*
I had to use Google maps to check the distance - at the time of writing this, for some reason it can't calculate the distance by car between Nottingham and Market Harborough, but it can using the walking distance. Weird.