28th October 2009

Another lovely sunny day :-)

I had to go and do some chores at the mother in laws so I thought I would cycle over to Wootton Bassett in an indirect scenic fashion, have lunch :-) do the chores then cycle home in another indirect scenic fashion :-)

I had the route all planned nicely yesterday evening...I got up, cooked some porridge for breakfast, chilled for a while, then thought ohh I must lube the bike chain!!!

Now as you may or may not know I can't just lube a chain without cleaning it! so I took the chain of and cleaned it in White Spirit, then I thought I may as well wash the bike......

This did mean I didn't get going from home until about an hour later than planned...So I ended up modifying the route slightly to cut a few miles of the journey to Wootton B. I also forgot to fill any drink bottles up and I did the whole ride dry.

Again I chose quiet single track rural roads, not quite as green today though!


I started out heading in completely the opposite direction to Wooton Bassett, then followed a few roads that I discovered on a cycle club leisure ride...

Why do steep hills never photograph? this is actually a 14% gradient....

Looking back at the top of the hill...the sign proves it...
Even with the rural roads and hills I was making much better progress than yesterday...
I was soon through Devizes and heading towards Alton Barnes, I have always liked the impressive hills surrounded by very flat land...

Unfortunately at Alton Barnes the route turns left and up one of the sets of hills...

Fortunately it is a quick climb from 500ft to 750ft then a fantastically drawn out descent of 6 miles where my speed was hovering around 25 mph :-)

I cycled through Marlborough then headed out on the Marlborough Road towards Broad Hinton

After a long draw out climb I arrived at the top of Hackpen Hill, where the road can be seen stretching out below the fantastically quick decent :-)

I made it to Wootton Basset in 2 hours 50 having covered just over 43 miles...

I had lovely Ham sandwiches and Egg sandwiches the spent a few quality hours pruning a Bay Tree with my chainsaw :-)

At 3pm I set off home...I headed out across country to Grittenham and Dauntsey, it looked like I was coming up short in miles and the weather was sooooooo nice so I turned right instead of left and headed towards the Somerfords, then cross country home.

The Garmin had the ride as 64.46 miles in 3 hours 39 mins with an average speed of 16.1 mph, route here...

Tomorrows plan is to do a little bit of trail riding on the Hybrid (Dawes 601), I plan to head out to the Ridgeway via NSN Route 4, then cross country (May get a little muddy!) to Alton Barnes have lunch at HoneyStreet, follow the Kennet and Avon Canal back to Devizes finally hop on to some local rural roads back to Lacock and finish on NSN Route 4 back home (Should be fun and a little slower than hammering around on the road bike!) Planed route here...