This week's long ride was a fairly last-minute affair, mainly due to the change in weather forecast meaning that Saturday was the only day over the weekend without heavy rain and gale-force winds. If I learned one thing this weekend, it is that online route planners cannot be trusted when gauging the difficulty of a ride...
What was planned as a fairly leisurely 55 miles turned into a grueling 6 hour ride. We left a couple of hours later than planned (my fault for not sorting out the chain earlier in the week) but made it to the lunch point on time. One cooked breakfast, a bowl of nachos and a baked potato later, we headed back out. Some beautiful moorland, some brilliant descents and a mile long section of 20% followed, but at around 3:30pm it was started to get dark and we were still about 10 miles from home, without lights. The decision was made to ride 5 miles to the nearest station and get the train the last bit, rather than ride the main, unlit, road back home.
The hills (roughly 1600 metres of climbing) really took it out of us. Where neither of us had ridden this distance for a few weeks, we weren't expecting it to be easy, but the online planner certainly underplayed the gradients in many places....
Apologies for photo quality; my phone camera isn't the best!
On the way to Princetown
Dartmoor, so desolately beautiful
There is a rainbow pretty much in the centre of this, but barely shows up
The bottom of the 20%
And the top! Notice who started second and finished first.... BOOM! (to be fair, Amy's thigh was playing up....)
More climbing!
What makes the climbing worth it
My (generally...) trusty bike
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