Twycrosser With Detour

Nice day yesterday, couldn’t leave work until after 5:30pm but I thought to do 25 miles or so. Conditions were a little windy, not too bad. Mostly sunny. Dry roads.

I did the Orton detour to Twycross. I came home the most direct way from there, as I didn’t really have proper lights.

The roads were phenomenally quiet – I only saw one vehicle on the road between Sheepy and the A444. Really quite idyllic in the evening sunshine. But sad passing through Heather as it was getting dark, and seeing both pubs closed.

I stupidly came out to the garage in my reading glasses instead of my varifocal cycling glasses, so I decided to rely on my unadorned eyeballs for this one. I could still make out my watch if I squinted, so that was fine. The only annoying thing was getting little flies in my eyes a couple of times. I think I’d probably wear sunglasses or goggles if I had perfect vision.

Took a pic near Orton which I hoped would give a sense of the view of the landscape, stretching miles into the distance. But the phone camera overexposed the background. I must start taking a proper camera on shorter rides.

Stayed out a bit longer than intended and was back a bit after sunset, but I had a head torch with me and the Tricross has a decent rear light.

Lovely view of a near-full moon, even in the bright sunlight before sunset. Always love to see it during the daylight.

Horrible news about the PM on 5 Live, just about a mile from home.

I used my Garmin Edge to record the track, and was going to use a GPX editor to tidy up the part of the track where I stopped near Twycross – due to GPS error a track will normally do a wild squiggle if you stop for a while, like this:

.. and it all gets added to the distance of course, which I regard as cheating. But when I had a look at the track recorded by the Edge, it looked like this at the same point:

I guess it must use an algorithm that only records track points if you’ve moved a certain distance first. Or perhaps it recognises small distance detours from your main track, and deletes them. Handy.

27.05 miles.

https://www.strava.com/activities/3263870209

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