or just taking a break?
The latter part of this week has seen a reasonable sprinkling from the skies, enough to mean my ride plans have needed adjusting and i've even broken out a wet coat a couple of times! That said, hereabouts, most of the wetness has been deposited overnight, the parched grass of a week ago is already looking somewhat greener and i've even had to contend with some localised flooding today. Does this mean an end to summer? well it's still quite warm and in other years we've had a lot more wet in August so i'm making no predictions.
So what have i been up to? Well with forecast rain shunting my ride to Friday, Thursday should've been all about writing. Sadly i just couldn't settle to the task, only managing a feeble 500 or so words.
Maybe a ride will help? Friday then was another variation of my Wiltshire loop, the day was grey and i did resort to the rain coat for a few minutes. I racked up 110km this time with 845m of up spread over almost exactly the same time as the previous ride.
Saturday was forecast to be a wash, and indeed the wet stuff descended on and off all day. A trip to the shops filled a few of the dry gaps then i did crack on with writing more Gaby. A chapter was finished and posted to Patreon, hopefully more will follow this week.
Todays forecast had a dry window, bookended by more of the wet stuff, a window just big enough to fit in the Imber ride i alluded to last time - provided i set off early. Which is why at the ungodly hour of 7.30, i set off for Salisbury Plain. There's not really much to tell, i arrived at Imber 3 hours later after riding into a stiff headwind and 'dodging' a couple of showers. The return was a little more interesting, a trip through Longleat took me to Frome where i picked up a tailwind that assisted me pretty much all the way back.
Somehow i avoided any further wet on the return 70 odd kilometres but i was ready to stop when i did, 136km, 1477m of climbing and 6.5 hours in the saddle. Ready but not exhausted despite those stats. I've ended up with 10k metres of up and @ 1200km distance for the month, its been a while since i've done those sorts of numbers.
Next time i post it will be September, in four weeks time i'll be jetting off to furren parts, Berlin if you must know, between now and then who knows what i'll get up to?
That's all for today, until Wednesday then,
Tschuss,
Madeline Anafrid
