A super-duper ride with Ali

Yesterday evening after getting home Ali and I plotted a route using the wonders of the OS map and google earth for us to go exploring on. She told me that we could leave at 9am so I woke her up at 8am, it only took 20minutes to get her out of bed! We left at 9:26am so for Ali that was amazingly early. The plotted route took us over towards Bury. Ali had her new Garmin which doesn't have a map page so we were seeing what navigating with that was like, so not to cheat I put mine on the compass screen. Turns out it works really well the arrow pointing in which direction you need to ride. The first bit was a bit of road and some cheeky footpaths, no sign of anyone around at all. Some of the bits were frozen ruts which were shaking me around. It wasn't long before we were dropping down steps (my face is a picture, I was scared after coming off on steps the other week) onto a sustrans cycle path. This must have been where everyone was so although it was nice and flat it was slow progress as we weaved around everyone!
After coming off the cycle path we had a bit of carrying, I amused Ali by inching over a narrow bridge backwards, due to my bike being on my right shoulder same as the handrail.

More trails and avoiding as many roads of possible and at one point we met this fellow, I think he wanted to come and play.

Then we climbed up to Peel Tower, I had to walk a few bits because of ice and my legs refusing to drag me up the hill. Ali was getting tired at this point and the tower was still looking quite small.

Up at the tower Ali rode round it since she'd never been there before, I hadn't realised that as we have been over the firing range, just not up there. Here after another cake stop we decided to drop back home on the road and leave the bridleway over towards Entwistle for another day.

21.25 miles @ 7.3 mph

680m climbed