live-cycle

Edinburgh-Manchester tandem ride: day 2

Sheepishly, gingerly, I looked out this morning to see if she had gone. Of course, she hadn’t, Katia was just hiding, sulking, waiting for us to come out to play, to spoil our fun with another tantrum. Typical bloody …

Well, we spent the night back in Edinburgh, right where we had started. After a hearty breakfast at the niece’s flat, and addressing some technical issues (new saddle and riding position for me, spd pedals for Chich, new front brake blocks) we drove to Innerleithen, the spot where we would have packed it in for the day, had we ever got there.  We drove over the beautiful pass that yesterday drove us back on ourselves. Glorious sun shining down on the heather, all shades of purple and green, desolate rolling hills carved up by gushing, rushing  burns. As we had a quick lunch in Innerleithen it began to rain. Again.

And so on two wheels Chich and I set off for Eskdalemuir (a town with no pub, I was later to discover). The ride was glorious, the weather was not. Once again, the uphills were slow, but it was on the downhills that gravity forgot its function, and we found our progress halted where normally we would have been dragged along by its force. Whoever heard of pedalling downhill. And then we were pulled this way and that, never knowing which way we would be tugged, twice extending our trip with an excursion across the grass verge. And the rain came too, in icy squalls. Katia hadn’t said her last to us. She was still harping and carping about how we had ignored her, but slowly her fury was waning, turning into a constant nagging that we could almost ignore.

We could not ignore the beauty of the countryside that we passed through, unheard-of places like Foulbog and The Wiss, and our last 15 miles to Eskdalemuir were along the fines roads that a cyclist could hope for, if you manage to avoid the gigantic logging lorries that chuntered by.

And at six o’clock, cold, wet, bedraggled, we reached our destination, to be rescued by our womenfolk and transported to hot shower and cold beer at a B&B in Longholme. After such a day, we surely deserve a little pampering, don’t we?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 13th, 2011 at 9:17 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.