ojwithbikes

Well we did it folks, cranks didn’t fall off but the bars and the levers did start doing what they want at points. I really should buy a torque wrench shouldn’t I…

I left the door of my lil south london home at the lovely time of 5am yesterday and arrived in Cardiff at 3:30pm-ish today.

On the first day I finished in Devizes and fell into the sweet arms of a Travelodge and a foot-long Italian sub from the Subway conveniently located below aforementioned Travelodge. First time having in a subway in years, not good, but yummy calories. It was all going smooothly until after around 4 hours of constant riding cramps began to creep in and would set in here n there whenever going up the small climbs. So that was fun. Whole second half of riding time was pretty dramatically slowed by that. Shock to the system I guess. Haven’t ridden a bike much more than an hour for the last month n a half.

Second day. Devizes to Cardiff. Left knee not playing the game. But with ibuprofen, some deep heat, and an unwillingness to quit, I hit the canal and stayed on it till Bath, hit the railway track for a bit, tunnel was mega fun i thought, but i did divert and took a shorter route through and into Bristol. Stopped at the brilliant Farro bakery for a just-under-halfway stop. Really good, quality stuff. If you like baked goods and nerd out a bit on flour, ya gotta check it out, as someone who works in the biz I’ll stand up and say it’s probably better than anything we have in London. ANYWAY, you know the rest: left Bristol, negotiated lots of closed shit around the Severn Bridge, got on it, rolled on into Cardiff. Fuck aye.

I took a mixed-terrain-as-much-as-possible-but-still-making-haste-in-westerly-direction approach to route planning. Sooo it ended up being mostly road obviously, but with the 45c tyres pumped up, enough fun offroad dribs and drabs, and the awful state of some of the major A-road cycle ways that made up the Welsh portion of the journey it was fine. No complaints there. Bike felt great, much more ærö-enabling than my last one.

Certainly not your most action-packed or scenic route choice or ride plan. 200 fairly flat, road-centric miles through middle England. But it was probably the perfect challenge for me right now at this point in the year. Plus, most of the reason I chose to do this is that I lived in Cardiff for a good 4 years a few years ago so the place has a lot sentimentality about it for me. I rode down the horrible Newport road strip, 6 lanes wide with every possible standard UK retail and industrial estate fixture bordering either side of the road, past the McDonalds, past the Halfords, basking in golden hour light with my headphones in playing music me and my friends used to listen to back when I was fun and didn’t regularly go to sleep at 8pm. And man was I happy to be there.

Some compressed pretty scenery pics attached.
I took some video and less pretty stuff too but that doesn’t really work here well. Might post some instagram soon, if ya happen to use it, im @ b_dare on it.

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