25th December 2009

Woke up late :-) cooked porridge for breakfast, sat in-front of a nice warm fire with a nice cup of tea and ate the porridge :-)

Did the normal family presents thing....wifey bought me a cycle repair stand and some Continental Grand Prix 4 Seasons tyres for the bike :-)

I obviously needed to try the stand out...so I set about stripping down, cleaning, greasing and re-assembling the bottom bracket on the Peugeot :-)

I had some issues pulling the sprocket crank off :-( and have pulled all of the threads out...I ended up putting the bolt back in loose and drifting the shaft out with a hammer.

The bearing grease was aged and a little dry, I cleaned everything down with white spirit and re-assembled using some lithium based grease.

When it was all back together and adjusted just right, I swapped the tyres over..

After lunch I got changed and went out for a little cycle ride.....

The plan was to do a reverse of the chain gang route.
The Fosse-Way was very Christmassy...

but all of the roads where clear of ice, that was until I turned right at teh end of the Fosse-Way, the road was compacted frozen snow :-(

Being a little pig headed I continued down it anyway!

Thankfully the road cleared after a couple of miles and I was tanking along full steam ahead again.

I unfortunately missed the left turn to Stanton St Quintin and found myself heading back to Grittleton, I hate doing return rides so I decided to carry on to Colerne.

From Colerne it was massive down hill to Batheaston then massive up-hill to Kingsdown. I then headed to Atworth, Whitley then over Gastard Hill and back home to Chippenham.

The Garmin had the ride as 44.27 miles in 2 hours 59 minutes with an average speed of 14.8 mph and over 2000 feet of climb, route here...

When I got back home I started cooking the evening meal...As its the first year....ever that we haven't had hordes of family descend we decided to have a 'normal' lunch and have a nice roast for tea.

After tea we will sit down and watch our traditional family Christmas film - 'Life of Brian', that always puts the whole religion thing back into perspective for me :-)