Heading for the hills...

 Could there be a nicer breakfast spot?

The sun is shining, there is good coffee and even better baked goods, and all you can hear is birdsong, lambs, bees buzzing among the herbs and the gentle snoring of an elderly cat.

I rode up here yesterday, 41 miles that steadily progressed from flat to rolling to hilly.  On the basis of a dreadful weather forecast I set out in 3/4 knicks and rainjacket, but it seems the gods were smiling on me for I had sunshine nearly all the way - and even more of a blessing, a tailwind on nearly every significant hill.

The view back towards York

I was less lucky on the way back to York - a torrential storm straight after breakfast delayed my departure, a second as I rolled into Kirkbymoorside necessitated a much longer cafe stop than I'd intended and a third as I approached York saw me soaked to the skin in minutes flat.

However, despite the hills and the weather, I had two days of great riding - and three things summed up all that is great about cycling for me:

1. The moment when you crest a hill and click back though the gears just far enough to turn the pedals as you swoop down the other side
2. The fact that I have all this glorious countryside waiting on my doorstep
3. Whizzing by a two-mile traffic jam on my way back into town (though why there was a jam coming into town at 4.20 on a weekday is beyond me...more people should be on bikes!)

Things I learned on my ride:

• That the highest point I reached before turning off Blakey moor is 319 feet higher than York.
• That while I don't suppose I'll ever love hills, and they still hurt and sometimes make me want to cry, I am getting better at them!  It was only a nasty little 10%-er at mile 40 (into a headwind too) that had me off the bike - and that only for a hundred yards or so - on the outward journey.
• That music is a great motivator.  Knowing that I was going to find parts of the ride tough I decided, unusually for me, to stick in my headphones (well, one anyway so I could still hear the traffic!) and hit shuffle... Weirdly, I have lots of music I didn't really recognise, and some I really don't like (can anyone tell me why Belle & bloody Sebastian are on my mp3 player??)
•  Daft Punk make particularly good cycling music - that steady metronomic beat kept me going for the last few rainy miles!
• Energy gels, while pretty rank, don't seem to have the catastrophic effect on my digestive system that a lot of people have mentioned to me.
• When a caffeinated gel and the Akira soundtrack kick in at exactly the same time, the result is some very aggressive riding!
• Nowhere feels like home like the North York Moors does.
• A weasel is weasily wecognised, but a stoat's stotally different (stoats are a bit bigger than weasels and have a black-tipped tail, if you were wondering.
• There's a whole lot more climbing on the way home...
• I will not be voluntarily riding through Bulmer again - the descent is terrifying, the climb back up the other side painful and soul-destroying
• Once you're wet, you're wet and there really isn't any point stopping to put on a jacket!

 The view from the top of my dad's drive... not the best way to start a ride!

The route: 

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You're Better Off By Bike!

You know traffic is becoming a problem when you sail past a huge queue of traffic, turn off to go to the shop in the next street, lock up the bike, spend a few leisurely minutes deciding what you want, have a chat with the assistant, unlock the bike, ride a couple of hundred yards up to the next junction & rejoin the original road - only to find the last car you passed before you turned off still sitting there!

Down by the River

Today's ride was long and slow, with much deep thinking and also much beautiful sunshine.  I took a few minutes to stand by the river and soak up the warmth. 

Tailwinds, Always... *

... Wouldn't that be nice? 

I didn't have a tailwind for all of today's ride, but it did help me out where it mattered - on the gentle, rolling hills which aren't a struggle as such but tire the legs; on the slow, draggy, coarse road through Great Ouseburn; on the boring stretch of "main" road through Shipton...

The route was the same as last Tuesday's, but done in fractionally less time - 2 hours 20, as opposed to 2 hours 35 (though that included about 10 minutes off the bike for various reasons.)  The title is my lovely local bike shop's motto, printed at the bottom of every receipt...

Arkendale

Looking over the Vale of York

 

 

Aldwark Toll Bridge

 

 

 

 

Always handy to know how far it is to Edinburgh...

Urban Jungle

Just a few hundred yards from my front door lies a little patch of countryside.  St Nick's Fields is a Local Nature Reserve, established only seven years ago on a site with a fairly unpleasant past - a leper hospital, brickworks and town tip.  These days, although you probably wouldn't want to roam after dark, it's a beautiful green space, teeming with wildlife and criss-crossed by paths.

Now, I'm no mountain biker, but my everyday bike is, in name at least, a mountain bike. Although it isn't really. It's a kids' Bike-Shaped Object.  It is styled to resemble a mountain bike but that's about as close as it gets.  This afternoon I found that it's still great fun off-road though - even if my town tyres aren't really grippy enough for loose gravel or bark chippings.

Ride, January 3rd 2011

A couple of years ago I discovered that Twitter was a good place to follow bike racing - it was during the Tour of California, and I had heard somewhere that Johan Bruyneel was live-tweeting the race from the team car.  I signed up, picked a few people to follow & sat down to "watch" the race.  Pretty soon, fellow cycling fans began to find me, and one of the first was a local guy, Rich, a.k.a. @hardboiled2006.  We chatted about the pros at first, who we were cheering for in California and then in the spring classics & the Giro; we moved on to discussing our own cycling (him: a regular rider putting in hundreds of miles a year on a flashy road bike; me: just taking it up again after 12 bikeless years, pottering about on a tatty old rescued-from-the-tip mountain bike.)  Often we just chatted, getting to know each other through an online presence of 140 characters or less.  Finally, a year or so later, we met, and when I got my first road bike we rode together.  We got in a couple of rides over the summer - easy, chatty social rides for him, which left me feeling pleasantly pushed (it's far too easy to relax & slow down when you're riding alone,) but when autumn came around life - and filthy weather - got in the way.

Weeks went by when we half-heartedly agreed to arranged something, then a new year's eve coffee and a twitter-chat and the ride was on at last: something between 20 and 35 miles, a nice relaxed pace, the all-important coffee stop.  We met at the Minster on Monday morning, joined by Tom and another twitterer, Matt, and headed out of town for a 21 mile loop through some of the prettiest villages to the south of town.  We set off along the river to Bishopthorpe, then on to Appleton Roebuck through the middle of a pheasant shoot - I'm used to checking the road for hazards, less used to looking up and dodging falling wildfowl!  The one "hill" of the day was the double railway bridge at Colton, from where we crossed the A64 (lordy, how I hate that junction!) to Askham Bryan and back in to town to my favourite café, Gray's Court to refuel and thaw our toes.

21 miles, plus to & from the city centre starting point
1 hour 58 minutes riding, another hour or so drinking coffee

A week is a long time in new home-ownership!

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The story so far - since getting the keys last Thursday, we have:

• removed the vile stair carpet and sanded, primed & undercoated the stair treads & landing. I've sprinkled fine sand into the undercoat to reduce the risk of slipping (especially outside the bathroom door, which is opposite the top of the stairs!)
• Still to do: paint stair treads & landing black, wallpaper stair risers, paint woodwork & walls.

• Stripped the kitchen of wall-units, tiles and wallpaper.
  
• Bought two rather handsome lights to replace the horrid strip-light (which is tucked in behind a beam so half of the kitchen is bright & half dingy)
• Still to do: Too much to even think about! To begin with, though, a coat of white paint (although eventually it'll be yellow to match the pantry, there are currently at least three different colours on the walls which need covering up) and some shelving to design & place brackets for before the re-wiring begins, so the electricians can fit the countertop lighting and extractor hood.
  

• Painted the pantry walls (Homebase "Lemon Juice.") It took four coats, but at last the Germolene pink does not show through! Primed & undercoated the window frame and given the existing shelves a first coat of white gloss.
• Still to do: Add more shelves, including space for my bargain marble slab (picked up in a charity shop this morning for £1.50!), add wine rack, give shelves & other woodwork a coat of shiny white gloss, add corkboard to inside of door for combined insulation & recipe display.

• Stripped the top layer off most of the living room wallpaper. I curse the name of the person who invented anaglypta. Vile, vile stuff. The steam from the stripper doesn't penetrate the top layer, so that has to be scraped off (for which task I'm loving my blade-on-a-stick), leaving the backing paper to be steamed off later.
  
• The gas fire has been disconnected (it was broken, and therefore dangerous) and the surround offered up on Freecycle - though why anyone would actually want a plastic, sorry, teak-effect gas fire surround is rather beyond me. My opinion has been borne out by the complete lack of replies.
• Still to do: finish stripping this bloody wallpaper, then, well, everything, really.

I'm waiting for the quotes to come in from the two electricians, and meanwhile I'm writing epic shopping lists for Ikea (with my mum on Thursday) and the rather wonderful DIY store/ timber merchant, handily en route from old place to new (Friday, when he has his next delivery of carpet edging doo-dahs.) The tininess of the storefront belies the absolutely vast range - he seems to have pretty much every bit of timber we could possibly require, and the tools & accessories to turn it into useful bits of furniture!