The motorised traffic was having to detour around this bridge on my ride in this am:
http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/incredible-pictures-show-how-bridge-790326
The guys on the bridge (local authority highways, I imagine) let me cross with the bike. No idea what the cause was, but it's at the bottom of a steep-ish hill (which has often been part of the Pie Run). If it was icy last night, that might explain it.
How did (s)he manage to hit
both sides of that bridge? It's suggestive of going too fast, since it's hard to see how you could have enough kinetic energy left after the first collision, to cause so much damage effectively rebounding off of a stone wall.
Beautiful sunrise on this morning's commute. Did I have a camera? No. No, I did not
These days, I always carry a waterproof camera in the back pocket of my jersey (as well as the camera on my smart phone), and I have the GPS turned on, so it'll have an instant fix (and orientation!) added to the EXIF data of the image. This has the side effect of recording the route of
every commute, admittedly only with a 30 second time resolution.
My commute this morning was surprisingly good, considering it was raining when I left. The rain stopped after a couple of minutes, so I just had to deal with the wet and inevitably crowded roads, filled with car drivers who seem to find wet roads an almost insurmountable problem, regardless of the UK's roads spending a significant proportion of the year like that.
I'm always amazed how much busier the roads get, when it's wet. I guess a lot of motorcyclists and cyclists switch to a more covered form of transport, as well as the people who can't conceive of walking for 2 minutes in the rain, to the local railway station (and similar).
All that aside, it was good to get back to cycle commuting, after 3 days on public transport last week, waiting for replacement bits to arrive, so I could put a new rear wheel on the bike. I replaced the wheel, swapped the freewheel over (
after I managed to find the correct removal tool!), put a new "Specialized All Condition Armadillo Elite II Folding Tyre" on, because the old one had enough wear and small slits in it that replacement was not very far away anyway, and a pair of new brake pads. The old brake pads were theoretically reusable, but worn enough that they'd probably act a bit oddly on a different rim profile. Cheap enough to replace, and I had to adjust them anyway, so wtf.