well for me at least! No riding, minimal cooking, maybe an earlyish night?

How so? I hear no one ask. Well its like this......

So on Thursday I decided to do the Peaky ride I had to abandon on Tuesday, bike fixed, dry forecast, and so I set off into the wild and woollies on my doorstep. Everything was fine, if a little cool until mid distance when the bike developed a shimmy,, not a tank slapping wobble but something altogether more mechanical. A little experimentation over the next few miles told me that it was fine going up hill but any downhill speed - well not nice. I got home and ascertained nothing was visibly broken, so the tyre then.

Fast forward to Friday, tyre is replaced, bike cleaned (don't expect that to often!) and plans made for Saturday. Given the strength and direction of the wind I came up with a one way ride with a train journey home and so to Saturday. I had several food stop points in my head and bale outs of the ride (4 potential outs depending on time and weather all with rail journeys home.) and so I set off into a grey and windy morning. Wind and terrain kept things quite slow for the first couple of hours then more rolling countryside allowed a faster, comfortable journey to the Trent, I passed the first, then second food stops, by the time I reached the third I was getting peckish and it was after one too - four hours riding on a coffee and custard Danish!

Food consumed, I returned to the saddle with the wind on my shoulder and flatter terrain to cover. Zoom, zoom, zoom - past the next bale out and the legs were good, the speed quite high and ground covered quickly. Now atm it gets dark here @ 5.00pm so at 4.00pm I needed to either bale out or push on to the end point fifteen or so miles away. Well I decided to push on arriving in now, almost dark, Scunthorpe just after 5.00pm, needing lights for others to see me (its annoying when I can see perfectly well but the bright car headlights make me invisible to drivers whose eyes can't see past their headlights). Train ticket purchased, over the bridge and ten minutes after arriving I was leaving delightful Scunny!

Its about 1.5 hours on the train for the approx. forty mile journey, its a real rural route most of the way stopping at every station, so that by the time I'd ridden the final ten kilometres from the station home it was after seven, ten hours from leaving home in the morning. So I was tired, @106 miles (169km to be precise), my brain was mush, so after eating and showering I stared at nothing for a bit and went to bed. Which is why I've done as little as possible today - an essential part of training is rest.

Anyhow, I have posted a new Gaby chapter - Memories, which I hope you'll all enjoy.

In other news:

• The editor has two more Gaby chapters to wade through.
• As writing is going quite well, I hope to get another segment of Avoidance out in the next ten days.

That's it for today, more midweek
Mads