Ellen's Tail End.

 Didn’t Fulfil Its Early Promise.

Open the curtains to blazing sunshine, some light cloud moves in during breakfast, the world becomes totally grey as the car is loaded up, the beginning of the rain is synchronised with our first pedal strokes. And, would you believe, stopped when we rolled back into Great Ayton after our ride. Me and La Mujerita had a little leg stretcher from Great Ayton to Guisborough Woods, climbing gradually to Highcliffe Nab, bypassing many of Guisborough Wood’s finest trails owing to La Mujerita’s well documented singletrack aversion. Perhaps a shoe shop at the end of each trail might help or a Cadbury’s Creme Egg for every dab-free descent. Today was just a fire road adventure, with side orders of drizzle and wind to add a bit of spice to the day. But a ride is a ride and always better than the alternative - which is not having a ride and all the associated adult responsibilities that could potentially entail. Better to be out in the wind and rain than joining the zombies trudging around garden centres and shopping malls, I think being impaled through a kidney by a brake lever would be preferable.

How Many People?

What a difference a day makes, as the song says. Same start, same woods, different companion, improved weather and the whole of Teesside (well the portion who can tear themselves away from daytime TV) are crammed on top of Roseberry Topping like penguins on a shrinking ice floe, heads swivelling in unison to watch me and SuperBri pedalling up from Aireyholme Farm. Today’s Guisborough Woods visit did take in a few of the trails, which meant a lot more down and up than yesterday, not that it seems to bother SuperBri, whose secret appears to be pre and post ride smoothies which look as though they are made from liquidised body parts - or maybe it’s just an offal milkshake. I’ll stick to being the fat lad at the back thanks all the same. There were a great many people about today but very few of them on bikes, there were even some climbers giving the north-facing green cliffs of Highcliffe Nab a bash. Our great disappointment of the day came at the farm cafe, which decided, for some reason, to stop, temporarily, serving food as we arrived, it was two pm, to me it’s another example of the british approach to service industry, it could never happen in Spain. They did point us in the direction of the farm shop which served coffee and snacks. 

Storm Ellen Couldn’t Frighten Us.

Another face from the past reappeared today, The Ginger One forced himself away from overtime and golf to come on his first bike ride for nearly two months. He keeps wittering on about some place called work, which is, apparently, what people do to pass the time until they can retire. In the way that bad dreams disappear when we wake up, the horrors of twelve hour shifts are hard to recall after nearly two years of liberty. We met at Square Corner with gale force gusts rocking our cars. According to the weatherman we are being treated to the tail end of Storm Ellen, the west coast of the country is being battered but over here on the east we have some vicious wind and even more vicious showers, rain coming across in huge, wet sheets, drenching everything including us. I introduced The Ginger One to some of the Silton Woods trails discovered last week and reintroduced him to the first trail he ever rode as a mountain biker, seventeen years and six days previously. He couldn’t remember it, mainly because it used to be a gloomy ride through conifers, not a track across open moor as it is nowadays. Eventually, after some wild and wet riding, we reached Over Silton at the bottom of the forest, from where we made our way to Boltby Forest and the Hambleton Drove Road, a simple sentence which glosses over a lot of pain and suffering as we gained the necessary height. It was worth it for the tail wind, Ellen’s tail end pushing us across the moor all the way to the Mad Mile and the blasting drizzle meant we had a rambler free descent of the Mad Mile. Back at Square Corner it was too rough even to consider a tailgate picnic, so it was bikes away, wet clothes off and back down the A19 for a front room picnic.