…it’s bl**din’ obvious that it’s rain, not drizzle! Drizzle my ar*e! Maybe if GW and I had stayed at ground level, and not climbed the dizzy heights of the Mendips into the cloud cover, there would have been drizzle. Up there it was rain.
You see GW’s idea of fun, in weather like this, is to go up hills. (There’s no accounting for taste). So we did. Well – up the Gorge anyway. Which was the Gorge. Doable but not precisely enjoyable. Especially when GW is chatting away next to you as you gasp for breath goldfish stylee. Still, a hill a ride seems to be the current thing, and it’s always best to get the suffering over early on.
Luckily for me, it was miserable enough on top that she revised her plan of going down East Harptree and then back up from Longbottom as neither of us are keen on wet gravelly downhills. Instead she took us a on a very wiggly, quite long, convoluted and rather inaccurate route across the top, around Binegar and the like, to end up at the Rocky Mountain Café.
It was wet. Very wet. With large quantities of standing water. Which was wet. In fact it was more like swimming than cycling. There was no visibility. Either because of the clouds we were cycling through, or the rain on the outside of the glasses and the mist on the inside. Slowly the water soaked through the layers, and the spray from the road crept up into my shoes turning them into little mobile paddling pools. The only real consolation was that at least it wasn’t windy too. Ok, it wasn’t really a consolation at all. But what with all the clouds around I was looking for a silver lining!
We sat in the café for a while, attracting bemused glances from the more sedately dressed clientele, with water pooling around us. To give us credit, we did remove their nice red cushions from the chairs before we sat on them which I think was very considerate of us. As we drank coffee, and toast/ed teacakes, steam rose slowly from our gloves, neatly lined up on the heater next to us.
Time came to leave, it could be put off no longer. Back on went the clammy layers, the dripping helmet, the warm yet squelchy gloves. Leaving a puddle behind us, which we warned them about in consistently considerate fashion, we headed back out into the drizzle. Which, unsurprisingly, was still rain. Grateful of the climb back up to the main road, which warmed us up a bit, we came home via Priddy, over the top, and back via Charterhouse and Shipham Hill again. A hill which was, it has to be said, not as much fun as the last time I went down it. It was however a lot more like canoeing than last time, as water cascaded across the road at every bend. Variety is the spice of life, right?
Having left the clouds behind or at least above us, from there it was but a hop skip and a jump down the main road home. As I dismounted at the front door, I looked down, in the expectation that all that water would have left the bike needing but a quick rub down before hanging on the wall. Not so. To add insult to injury, it would appear that some of that wet had mud in it, and there was nothing for it, it had to be washed. Ah well, at least doing so gave GW time to hit the shower, and me time to cool down before I did.
Peeling off the layers was possibly the quickest weight loss diet ever. There is now a pile of wet festering lycra awaiting space in the washing machine… Even after a warm shower and clean clothes I swear it took me a couple of hours to feel dry again!
Cycling time: 2:39:45
Distance: 35.46 miles
Avs: 13.3 mph
ODO: 7086 miles