In 2011, the year after
guiding 14 cyclists Coast to Coast from Walney to Saltburn (including
a Bishop) I was trying to think of another cycling challenge for my
friends and myself to do.
Although it's a pretty
arbitrary reason to organise a bike ride, I like bike rides that can
be explained to non-cyclists. A start and end point they've heard of
helps, as in one coast to another, although to be honest as soon as
I start talking about cycling, they mostly just go to sleep in a big
bed of disinterest.
People who don't cycle
are astounded that I can even cycle to the corner shop. They have
absolutely no frame of reference. A bit like how people who drive
everywhere in a car are absolutely incredulous at any distance
further than one end of a car park to another that can be covered on
foot. The thing about both cycling and walking, is that you can
pretty much go anywhere, if you allow enough time.
Anyway, since I like
York Minster and Durham Cathedral, and because they are possibly the
two most well known places in this area, I thought cycling between
them would be an easy one for people to grasp. The actual ride was
going to take place over two days, including an overnight stop in
Ingleby Barwick, but the day before the official ride, some of us
decided to ride to York Minster for the start.
A bit like with
birthdays, where it's sometimes easier to enjoy the day before or the
day after, this prelude ride turned out to be maybe better than the
ride itself.
Stephen, Mark and I
decided to do the pre-ride ride, and part of the reason we were able to do it, was because we got an extra Bank Holiday in 2011 for the Royal Wedding, otherwise we might have just got the train down, and only done the main ride.
For some reason all our rides
seem to involve a stray clergyman / bishop so this time we took
Stephen's brother-in-law Dick the Vic. The route to York was about
60 miles. Dick doesn't ride a bike normally, so he'd borrowed one.
3 miles into the ride at Hilton we stopped to put our rain jackets
on, and Dick announced that, 3 miles in, this was now his longest
ever bike ride, although he does run up stairs a lot. This is going
to be a long next 57 miles I thought.
I needn't have worried.
As podgy as Stephen, Mark and myself are, Dick is a lean spidery
specimen, with hardly any body fat. He made a mockery of any
theories anyone might have about how to ride up hills by completely
failing to understand how to use the gears on the bike, and riding up
the hill incredibly fast in top gear, leaving the rest of us for
dead. He just likes to get the hills over with, he said. Don't we
all.
Actually the hills only
started after Brompton (near Northallerton). There were a couple of
big hills to cover during the day, but nothing too serious. My route
planning ability was called into question a couple of times by other
cyclists we met though. As we crossed the A684 near Northallerton, a
thin reed-like cyclist we met said 'Oh, you're not going that way,
are you?. It's hilly'. Then further on, we met another cyclist who
was running alongside his bike holding it by the saddle. He was
wearing tiny cut off running shorts and his disposition was that of a
scared man running away from someone in a slasher movie. 'Don't go
up there, he said, hilly'. He looked like someone who had
spontaneously given up cycling on the spot, and he was taking his
bike home to throw it in a skip.
Despite the
scaremongering of the locals, we were having a lovely day. Each of
the little North Yorkshire villages we rode through was decked out in
bunting to celebrate the Royal Wedding, and none was prettier than
Felixkirk. By the time we got there, we'd covered around half of our
60 miles, and it was just after lunchtime. We should probably eat
something, we thought.
Clearly the pub (The
recently refurbished Carpenters Arms) had just finished having some
sort of Royal Wedding barbecue, there were big gas barbecues all over
the place, but not many customers, we must have just missed the main
event.
We went in the pub,
ordered some drinks, and before we had chance to look at a menu, the
barmaid said 'Oh, we've been doing burgers for the Royal Wedding, we
can do you a burger each if you want'. Okay, that'll do, we said.
Can we have chips too, we said. She looked puzzled and said she'd
include them for free. That'll be £40 please, she said. Bloody
hell, that must include the drinks I thought, but No. Blimey £10
each for a burger, I know it's sunny but I didn't realise we were at Wimbledon. Anyway, we
went and sat outside in the sun, enjoying our drinks, while they
powered up one of the giant barbecues. They chucked 4 slabs of beef
on the thing, which didn't look like a tenner's worth each, but never
mind, it's sunny, and what could be more English than this?
Once the burgers were
cooked, they were brought over on some oversized plates, and they
still didn't look much like £10 a go. Just then however, whole
teams of waiters and waitresses started pouring out of the pub as if
there was a fire alarm, except they were all carrying side dishes to
go with the burgers. No wonder they looked puzzled when we wanted
chips, there were jacket potatoes, coleslaw, whole boards full of
salad, some sort of chilli salsa dip kidney bean thing which was a
meal in itself. By the time we'd made a valiant attempt at all that,
we could barely walk, never mind get back on a bike.
Anyway, we eventually
wobbled off in the direction of York, we had to go up another big
hill at Crayke. I guess eventually some of the food must have
started being digested, because the pain from the food balls in our
stomachs relented a bit, but then Mark and Dick started to get
rucksack pain, both in their backs and also they started to get
rubbed by the shoulder straps. Dick's rucksack in particular was
very big and bulky, so I wasn't surprised. Seeing as I was actually
more of an actual cyclist, I had panniers on my bike, so I wasn't
carrying a rucksack, although for the last few miles I did carry
Mark's, to give him a breather.
We got to the Minster
around 5, where we were met by Ruth, and although we'd missed the
Royal Wedding there was another wedding going on outside the Minster.
The bride was quite a bit older than Kate, but she looked absolutely
stunning and she was worthy of a Royal Wedding all to herself, but,
as lycra clad middle aged men, we tried not to spoil the moment by
wandering into the background of any of the wedding photos.
As I observed the
wedding, and the tourists milling around, looking absolutely thrilled
to be in York, and I reflected on the day, all the little villages
we'd ridden through decked out in red, white and blue, I thought if
there was a day you could bottle to define how great it is to be
English, and living in England, this was it.
Once we'd all checked
into our hotels / B&Bs and as if we'd not had enough to eat
already, we then walked for about an hour into York to do that other
very English thing, going out for an Indian. At the Viceroy of
India.
As well as being very
tall and thin, Dick the Vic has got enormous feet, and as we walked
into York, I noticed he was wearing a giant pair of clown size beige
shoes. Dick, where did you get those?, I said. Oh, I've been
carrying them all day. I couldn't believe it. I've been on week
long cycling holidays with luggage that weighed less in its entirety
that just the leather in Dick's shoes. Further evidence of his
amateurishness.
But there are some
advantages to being a proper cyclist. Despite the fact that Dick had
made a mockery of our hill climbing and then he'd cycled all day with
a giant pair of shoes on his back, one thing you can't avoid as a
novice is the damage done to your, how can I say politely, contact
areas, if you don't have regular saddle time, and as well as the
welts on his shoulders from the rucksack straps, he had some on his
sitty down bits too. Not so me.
For the second time in
a day, we ordered way too much food and mine came in a bucket. It
was delicious except there was so much it wouldn't fit on the table,
a fact which the waiter greeted with absolute apathy.
The next day we cycled
from York to home, and then the day after that we cycled from home to
Durham, and although those two rides had their good bits, I felt a
bit stressed by the whole being the leader thing, whereas the
pre-ride ride was a pressure free bonus day, and I probably enjoyed
it more for that reason.
So to sum up, thank you
for getting married William and Kate. Although your wedding was an
irrelevance to me, the extra Bank Holiday was one of the best days
out I've ever had.
I was going to put a
link to this ride in a recent blog post, and I couldn't believe I'd
never actually written the post I was going to post the link to, so
here it is. Better late than never.
