live-cycle

Edinburgh-Manchester tandem ride: day 1

Woke up this morning to sunshine on Arthur’s Seat (cover up, man, have you no pride). To the north, across the Forth, the dark clouds that had brought overnight rain were disappearing towards Iceland, or wherever is the heavenly graveyard of rainclouds. Across the city of Edinbrugh there is a fantastic rainbow. And not a sign of Katia. Predictable, I suppose, for such a flighty female to be late.

And finally they are on their way. Katia, take note of that sunshine

And so we set off without her, Chich and I. We left Holy Rood House a little after ten o’clock, waved off by our retinue of three, to wobble our way unsteadily through the outskirts of Edinburgh and our way south.
We reached Gorebridge in reasonable time – a town you would want to pass through only once. Soon after we stopped at a crossroads to check the map, take sustenance (bananas) and don our rain jackets because it was beginning to drizzle.
We passed through Middleton without even knowing it, the town is so small, and our next stop, 13 miles down the road, was Innerleithen.

Between us and Innerleithen was nothing but open road with no cover, nowhere to hide, and a climb that went to the other side of nowhere. It was here that Katia caught up with us. And she wasn’t pleased, to put it mildly. Hell hath no fury, and all that. And we caught the full  force of her fury. There she was, right in our faces, a gale of tongue-lashing. Suddenly we had to pedal on the downhills just to keep moving. She showed us no mercy. And finally, on the long uphill without end, we were forced to push. We pushed for more than two miles, fighting into the teeth of a gale, lashed by Katia’s ire.

Eventually we realised that, even when we reached the next downhill, we wouldn’t be able to ride. The prospect of pushing a further eleven miles was too much. And so we turned the beast around, mounted, and headed back for anywhere that would provide shelter from Katia. Before we knew it we hit 40mph on the downhill, Katia hot on our heels. On the flat, without pedalling, we cruised along at almost 30. It had been well over two hours since we had left Gorebridge, it took us just fifteen minutes to return. There after much searching we found the only pub in town, where they kindly fed and watered us while we dripped on there clean floor and awaited rescue by our womenfolk. And so, tonight, we will sleep in Edinburgh again.
One thought strkes me as I write this – it is great to see a rainbow, all the colours of the spectrum, all the beauty. But while you can see the end of the rainbow, you can never reach it. Let’s hope that’s not prophetic.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2011 at 5:27 pm and is filed under Dennis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.