Riding over the hills

Today I persuaded Ali she wanted to come riding with a group that I sometimes meet up with as they were riding from Rivington. We rode over to lower barn to meet them, going via Chorley New Road to avoid the hills. As we were a little late in leaving we ended up having to ride over at a fair pace. There were six of us in total and the weather looked like it might just be nice to us! We headed off over Belmont road, nothing like a nice big hill to help you warm up! Ali found this hill hard, I think she could do with a compact on her bike as oppose to a double. But she got up every hill of the ride on it!

From there we went over to tockholes, round the edge of Dawen to get the Roman Road, this road has a couple of nice 20% sections where its hard to get the speed on the downhill leading into it as it is so twisty! I'm sure if I had a straight run at some of them I could at least get halfway up before pedalling! We then did the hard climb up to the Strawbury Duck for a well deserved lunch. It seems to be back to normal high standards after a few dodgy months, with nice big portions of food!

Then we went to Edgeworth for ice-cream. By this point I was feeling a little full for cycling! Before heading along Green Arms road and back over to Belmont. Where we left the rest of them to cycle over the Belmont road and we basically free-wheeled home.

Picture here is Jane trying to make the hill look easy, you can see the road we had just come down in the background.

Mine and Ali's stats were:

39.6miles @ 12.2mph, 1020m climbed

More pics on Ali's flickr page