29 December 2006 Glentress Red

Down to Glentress with Neal for an end-of-year ride.

It was very cold, windy and raining so we decided to do the red route (usually we mix and match different parts of Glentress) and just meet back up at the Hub, rather than have Neal keep waiting for me.

It's great how you can keep going back to places like Glentress and make it new. This time we started at the Hub rather then going up to the Buzzard's nest car park - and the Spooky Wood section was open. We seem to have been unlucky with that in the recent past and have had to follow diversions half way up the hill.

I actually caught up with him twice, which was quite gratifying, but discovered later that Neal had taken a tumble on the first bit of downhill. He was ok, but when I caught up with him at the very top of the course it turned out he had buckled his front wheel quite badly.

He'd pressed on as it was ok-ish uphill, but under the circumstances all we could do was to loosen off his v-brakes to clear the buckle. Unfortunately the first bit of Spooky Wood downhill (which I loved) made it clear he didn't have enough stopping power, so we had to teeter all the way back down on the forest tracks - especially frustrating as the stop at the top had turned us from toasty warm to absolutely freezing and now we couldn't get warm again on the way down. Salutory lesson on just how cold you can get and how quickly when you're wet.

So, a bit of a frustrating outing; Neal needs a new bike.