Didn’t want to go too far today as I was feeling a little worn down from the combined effects of a fondo on Thursday, a gig in Stoke last night and two overnight jobs at work earlier in the week. Minimally though I wanted to do 34 miles, to get the October mile count up over 300.
I thought I’d do some variation of a Twycross Bypasser, with an excursion down the Dad’s Army route at the bottom. The wind was coming from the south-west, ideal for this route.
I wanted if possible to go right down to Kingsbury Water Park, which I hadn’t done since I first did this ride just over two years ago. I didn’t upload the route to a GPS app or anything like that, I just hoped I’d remember it. I wouldn’t be overly troubled if I didn’t. One change I made was to join the A5 earlier, to avoid the twisty, climby, gravelly little narrow track near Dordon. A case of a choice of two extremes, neither particularly desirable.
I turned off the A5 after two miles of it. A mile later I was convinced that I’d taken the wrong exit, or missed a turn somewhere, because I didn’t recognise where I was at all. In fact (as I discovered later by scrutinising the track on Strava) I was on exactly the right road, and if I’d stayed on it another four or five miles I would have arrived at Kingsbury Water Park.
But I didn’t. I decided to take a left turn signposted to a place called Wood End. Half a mile later I was confronted with a uncompromising-looking hill. I’d done 22 miles at this point, so I opted to turn back. I rejoined the Bypasser route five miles or so later, and continued home through Sheepy, Bilstone, Barton in the Beans, Odstone and Heather.
Took the above pic on the A5 on the way back.
Saw a very large number (a murder?) of crows in a field near Barton, about half of them airborne. Something seemed to have agitated them. And there was a beautiful partial rainbow visible from Gibbet Lane, with all the ROYGBIV constituent colours clearly distinguishable. I was going to take a bike pic with it in the background but by the time I’d found a suitable spot, it had faded a bit. So I didn’t bother.
The roads were a bit wet from overnight rain when I set off, but soon dried off. I did hit a patch of wet roads again on the way back near Heather, though I hadn’t picked up a spot of rain on the ride. I’d guessed that might happen when I saw the rainbow segment hovering over that general direction.
Back on 43.20 miles which takes me to 310 this month. Another 117 to do to hit this month’s target + last month’s deficit.