I don’t know why I bother with weather forecasts.  Think of the stress I would avoid if I simply woke up in the morning, looked out the window, stuck my head of the door, and carried on accordingly.  Last night the BBC weather forecast for today threw a spanner in my mental cycling planning works by predicting rain all day, with the possibility of thunder as the cherry on top.  After a horrified text to George last night, I went to bed fully expecting to wake up this morning to torrential rain, and to having to cancel our planned ride.

Fast forward to this morning.  Open the curtains to…grey with bits of blue, no wind and…more importantly…no rain!  The weather forecast was still predicting rain but since it hadn’t yet arrived and, as time passed, showed no sign of doing so, I got ready to ride.  George has a tendency to go out whatever the weather anyway, so I layered up, filled the bottle, and was ready with plenty of time to spare.  Just as well as she was proper early.  Apparently they’d cancelled the school church service, and voila, there was George on my doorstep.  By the time we’d both faffed appropriately we probably left at around the scheduled 9:45am anyway!

I’d been press-ganged into planning our route – 40 miles with a few hills – so that’s what I did.  As the forecast was totally rubbish, as I believe I may have mentioned already, we decided to do the route anti-clockwise, and hopefully not get caught out on the top of the Mendips, where nasty weather can be proper ‘orrible, when/if it hit.  George is in recuperation mode, having recently had surgery on her knee, so I guess you could call her knee-dicapped instead of handicapped *grin*.  This has the advantage of slowing her down going up hills, so we chatted our way up Cheddar Gorge, which helped compensate for the fact that I’m never warmed up enough by then – it’s too close to home!  It wasn’t too much like hard work to be fair, and the same went for all the hills on the route, proving that I haven’t lost it just yet.  So – the ups were fine and the downs were fun.  The descent of Burrington Combe was an absolute blast, even though I did approach it with a degree of caution as it was wet underfoot.  Or underwheel.  Undertyre? 😉  Anyway, nothing wrong with being a little careful, what with me preferring to be on the bike, not off it!

The rain held off until we after we left Weston and started the climb up Bleadon Hill from Uphill and by that time we were properly on the way home and unlikely to be too disheartened by it.  It’s only water right?  I flew down the hill after the Webbington without braking, which was unusual for me, so it took me a little while to realise I was minus George, and after a u-turn I discovered her by the side of the road fixing a rear puncture.  She had said she’d been meaning to switch from slicks to winter tyres…and now she was really wishing she had!  She made changing it look easy though, and since we were still gassing, it seemed to take no time at all until we were back on our way and, shortly after that, back at my house.

Cycling time: 2:44:13 hrs
Distance: 41.11 miles.
Avs: 15.0 mph
ODO: 10816 miles

A slightly longer ride than usual, which made a nice change, and it was great to have company, and to catch up 🙂

So, in other news, my website has been tweaked and changed a bit, which you may have noticed.  Should you feel the urge you can now “like” my posts, and share them on Facebook, or even share them on Twitter.  Ooh, I’m so social media savvy ;).

PS – not that savvy – having button issues, so they may come and go for a while!