well not today, but on Saturday, taken a while to recover.
With a required trip to Durham for the start of the university term, I decided it was time to get on with my planned coast to coast ride.
Plan, drive up and get the train across one day, ride back on the second day and drive home on the third day.
Train strike on Saturday meant it could not be the train day, so Saturday was riding day, regardless of the forecast.
Friday afternoon - drive to Newcastle, lashing down with rain for the last two hours of the journey, stopped raining just as I reached Newcastle and the sky cleared. Nice no need to get way the day before the ride. parked in Newcastle central station car park, plenty of spaces, and a low rate for an all weekend stay. Onto the platform to find three other bikes, a couple who had just completed coast to coast and someone doing something else, then three more cyclists arrived. Hmm, no reservations required for bikes on northern rail now looked sketchy. Train comes in the guard is insistent that only two bikes get on, lucky for me the only other solo cyclist was there first and got on the train first, so I go the remaining space.
Saturday morning, woke up, had breakfast and made the short journey to Whitehaven, not as early as I would have liked, before riding through many fords and stream on the roads resulting from Friday night's rain, arrived at Keswick to find my wallet was not in my pocket, quick call to the hotel and they had it, I asked them to ;post it as I didn't want to ride back from Keswick. Everything today would not be pay by google pay with my phone.
Reached the top of Hartside after a little over 6 hours, everything was going well, half the distance and more than half the climbing, foolishly didn't refuel in Alston. resulting in slow going by the time I reached Consett just as it was getting dark. After conset and onto cycleways I was much less impressed by as the surface was a constantly changing field of tarmac, good quality fine gravel and mud. Everything as signed up as NCN, but we know that is no guarantee of quality. I just wish there was consistency along stretches between roads, so you know what you are signing up for, and that tarmac does no suddenly shift to mud halfway along a 3km stretch.
Then came Newcastle and the navigational problems of urban cycle ways, (oh I shouldn't have taken that subway, but the bridge 50m further on) stopping to check into the travelodge as I rode along beside the tyne and deposit my stuff, before riding to the coast at Tynemouth. Then the metro back to the city centre, where I found the station car park was locked and i could not recover my bag of clothes from the car. Lucky I was carrying friday nights clothes and I didn't need to venture out into late night Newcastle kin my cycling gear in order to find food.
A long day in the saddle, but the weather was kind for October, just a few tweaks I would have made to the route if I were to do it again.
