so what's new?

Well Monday Bert was pretty much blown through so i ended up taking a bit of a walk, however the aftermath of the storm meant i ended up having to take a couple of detours en route to a very tasty Pork sandwich. Beres it wasn't (class 1 Pork sandwich shop chain in South Yorkshire) but it was alright for a suthern tea bar.

Tuesday, with a bright but cool day forecast the intention was to get in a decent longer ride. I hadn't reached Bath before a thorn interrupted play and i wasn't overly confident that the replacement tube was holding air well, i decided to cut things short so my long ride became a mere 40km and to add insult, the tube seemed to be okay after all - grr!

So to today, Aunty Bev was heading to Port Talbot so i ended up grabbing a lift with the bike. Whilst not alpine in altitude, the climbs of the Bwlch and Rhigos both top 500m and featured on my 'bucket' list of roads to ride and Port Talbot is a good spot to tackle them both from. The weather was cool, @ 2c as i set off on the 20km+ climb out of Port Talbot to the Bwlch summit, its never above 10% but even so the length means its a fairly tough climb especially if you haven't done much of this sort of stuff recently. I had expected to take 1.5 hours or thereabouts and i was a few minutes ahead of that at the top. So that's almost 500m climbed but of course to get to the second climb you have to drop @ 200 of those metres as you reach the Rhonda valley.

The Rhigos climb is barely 6km long but gains 312m, it's a fairly steady 7/8% pretty much the whole way, the views from the top are worth the effort before a hair raising descent off the mountain. From this point, the route back to the coast is barely troubled by upwards metre gains and the 'old' road has very little traffic all the way to Neath. I stopped the gps in PT with 80km covered and over 1000m of ascent - an excellent day's riding. I finished the days exertions with a walk out to fetch a mucky curry - yep a day to bring a smile to anyone's face.

That's it for now, so until Sunday,
Tschuss,
Mads.

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