Hoped to do 20 or so after work, but while I was at Tesco an hour or so before I intended to set off, the rain came down in bucketloads. That seemed to be the end of that idea, but I returned home, three miles from there, to dry roads and sunny skies.
Interesting how micro-climate-ish it is around here. I’m sure my native Teesside is nothing like that.
Careful scrutiny of the rainfall radar told me that if I stayed to the south of Ashby I’d avoid rain or wet roads. And that was always the intention anyway, so I set off on a Twycrosser at about 4:30pm. The forecast threatened a shower at 6pm-ish. As things turned out, that didn’t happen but I took the Boardman anyway.
Left the house quite quickly, so as to make the best of the remaining daylight hours – both of them – and forgot to bring the new bike computer out with me. I’d had it in the house to calibrate it. No biggie, but it meant that I didn’t have a record of the distance done until I’d finished. Was recording the track on my phone.
Since I was trying to keep it short, I took the lovely Bilstone Road to, er, Bilstone from Twycross, then Barton Lane. Beautifully quiet crossing the little hump back bridges between the fields. I didn’t see another road user the whole way from Twycross to Barton.
Cool and rather blowy, but not enough to spoil the fun.
Quite a few pheasants (or is it grouse?) around, some of them dead.
Thought I’d have ended up on about 22 miles on returning home but nope, 18.6. There are so many permutations of the Twycross route that it’s impossible to memorise the distances. Getting a bit dim as I returned home, a few minutes after the Sun went down. Nice view of the two-thirds Moon, even before sunset.
More on Thursday I hope, when the weather is slated to be rather mild temperature-wise (15 degrees in the afternoon), but rather windy. But I can’t go too far, I’m on call again.