Cold

The weather has turned cold, its barely got above freezing all week.  It has been very sunny and little or no wind though, but the sunny days don’t matter when it goes dark at 4 and you don’t leave work til half 6.

Anyway, apart from the cold, it was the normal weekly commute.  My ribs are good enough to allow me to ride the fixie again, which I prefer in the icy weather.

No Thirsty Thursday ride as our friend Nic is moving to Manchester this weekend and we went to the Taps for a few pint to see him off.

Friday was a day off, so I decided to ride out to meet Jayne from work.  It was still very cold, I had to keep off the really quiet lanes because of icy mud on the farm roads.  Managed to get 20 miles, a club sandwich and a pint of Black Sheep at the Farmers Arms.  This pub is in the village where we used to live and I’d not been in for about 15 years.  It had changed hands recently and vastly improved, but the beer still wasn’t the greatest, maybe the first of the day, but not great.  By the time I got home my hands were frozen.

While we were out Ian texted to see if anyone was out on Saturday.  No one else was so we decided to head up to Grizedale.  There was a light dusting of snow on the roads as we headed up, but turning off the Barrow road onto the back roads to Saterthwaite and Grizedale we were glad to be in Ian’s Landrover as the roads were thick with ice and compacted snow.  Bit of a shock at Moor Top wher ethey had installed pay and display parking machines, not yet in service though.  Not sure how that will affect visitor numbers in future though.  We headed off to do the loop out east from Moor Top down Eel House and Greythwaite Hall.  The going was a curious mixture of harder and easier at the same time.  The snow filled in and softened the sometimes very rocky technical sections, the boggy sections were frozen, but just when you needed it there was no grip.  We were very circumspect on the really tricky bits, choosing to walk rather than risk injury.  The climb back up from Greythwaite Hall was an unrideable slog up what is usually a hard, slippery climb.  The snow capped fells were a beautiful backdrop to the day though.  We had to skip the downhill to Coniston due to failing light and general knackeredness.  We got back to the car and got changed.  Only the presence of others avoided a bare bottomed snow ball fight as Ian hit me with snow as I got changed.  I had to retaliate.

Sunday we headed out for a short ride on the tandem. It was still cold.  We only did ten miles, the roads were still quite icy and Jayne wasn’t happy.  We took about 3 hours to thaw out.

All in all a reasonable mileage.

Miles for the week – 100

For the year – 5062 miles

Cheers

Tim