Slow road

Maybe in taking 2 hours 45 mins to do a 21 mile circuit on the mountain bike I was simply trying to adhere to the leisure cyclist rule: The bike ride undertaken must exceed the amount of time taken to drive to the ride destination.  Maybe that was it.

http://www.cotswoldsaonb.org.uk/bibury route pdf

Arriving late after an unprecedented amount of faff to leave the house, I set off on the route above at 2pm on Saturday with confidence I should be back at the car by 4pm.  So confident was I of this that my safety person who had been e-mailed a copy of the route and proposed start and finish time had been advised 4pm finish.  Texted her at 3:45 with an um, well, all is well but I am slow kind of a text.  It wasn't even a testing route.  You could, if you weren't being particularly discerning describe it as undulating but in reality check out the contours ... it really was as flat as a pancake other than two teeny steep ups (pushed the bike up the final bit of one of these).  Yet I dallied and I dawdled and somehow made it last nearly 3 hours.  No mechanicals, no hills, nothing wrong with me or the bike. 

I do seem to lack any short term memory of what I'm doing though.  Not a signposted trail but one dependent on carrying a map but somehow I struggle to remember any more than two turns at a time.  Sometimes struggle to remember anything other than the next turn.  So I guess there were more than a few map reading stops and starts.

You couldn't make up the beauty of some of this ride.  21 miles without seeing another cyclist or a walker.  However, going alongside a hedgeline with a field of grain and poppies to my left, from the hedgeline I see an enormous bird give just one flap of mighty wings and soar away over the field.  A hare, ears tipped with white and black pauses on the path ahead of me, then spooked by me and the bike leaps off into the field where his ear tips are visible above the poppies as he joins another hare and together they move through the grain, ears bobbing and darting as they run.  Amazing memories.