Left work earlyish – not as early as I intended, but one of my idiot colleagues pushed back a meeting by half an hour then cancelled it at the last minute. Anyway I did get out of there at about 15:45.
I’m hoping to do all the neighbouring counties of Leicestershire again this year as usual and last night, I had a look through the tracks I’ve already done in 2020 to see which ones I’d ticked off already. Only Derbyshire and Nottingham, as it happens. Frustratingly I stopped a couple of hundred metres short of the Staffordshire border before turning back on my trip out west on Thursday. Anyway I noticed that I could take in a bit of Warwickshire by extending a Twycrosser to the west a bit, so that’s what I did today. Turned off the main road down to Twycross to go through Norton, Orton and Warton. I wasn’t 100% sure I’d been into Warwickshire until I encountered a ‘Leicestershire’ sign on the way back in. Why can’t all public roads have signs to tell you when you’re entering a different county?
A few minutes after I set off I noticed a helicopter crossing overhead, then about ten minutes later I saw it sitting in a farmer’s field, not far from the road! I stopped to take pics. The pilot appeared to be consulting a map, and he took off again not long after I stopped.
According to this : https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/g-spri – it landed at Birmingham at 16:11 which can’t be right, as this was only about 10 minutes later than that.
Absolutely beautiful out there in the open on the quiet road between Norton and Orton. Noticed the orange light from the setting sun ahead of me reflecting beautifully off the shiny patches on the road, so I stopped to take a pic:
That’s pretty much untouched apart from being resized; straight off the phone.
Dark not long after that of course but I had highly adequate lighting. And I wore a helmet, again. Good that I’m getting back into that habit, I must admit.
Roads mainly dry. Not too cold. A bit windy.
Back on 31.72 miles. The old bike computer I put back on the Boardman behaved properly. Hopefully cleaning the contacts has fixed it.
I must do that extension more often; it extends a Twycrosser nicely (non-Twycrosser might be more accurate, it actually bypasses Twycross by about a mile). And it’s a nice, quiet stretch with nice landscape visible for miles.