The week

has turned out quite Cheddary!

or at least that's where i ended up eating my slightly sweaty sandwiches at lunchtime. But lets go back a bit, as you will recall, my excitement over the part to get my bike on the road was dashed by an admin error and by Thursday i was getting a bit stir crazy so i ended up taking the emergency bike on another trip around Brizzle, better than nothing but unfulfilling. But better news awaited my return, Aunty Bev was off to Wales again on Friday, some new roads, even on the emergency bike, always lift the mood.

So on Friday morning we made the two hour drive over the Severn where i was dropped just East of Swansea on another warm morning, with @ four hours to play with. My plan was simple, follow Swansea Bay to The Mumbles then bay hop along the Gower coast before taking a more inland route back past Swansea and on to the rendezvous in Port Talbot. It really was a nice ride, stunning coastal scenery, rolling heathland and even some canal chasing.

Saturday was always going to be for writing but the replacement parts were due too so i was effectively tied to the house until after lunch. It was another day of 30c plus temperatures so i was never going to go far anyway but the heat does nothing for my creative juices so i only got half a chapter finished. The part was fitted, forty minutes had everything in place and adjusted up (it would've been a bit quicker but for a schoolgirl error in cable routing!).

Which brings us to today. There were two things i needed to do, road test the bike with all its smorgasbord of new / recycled parts and secondly, make a dent in the Everest challenge. On the first of those, whilst i'll do a checkover / readjust tomorrow, everything is running sweeter than it has for a while so that's all good, thanks once more to those that have allowed it to happen in a timely fashion, you can't believe what it means to me.

And so to the second item on the day's agenda. If you recall, the challenge is to climb 8848m during July and whilst i'd had a couple of longer rides, the 2000m on the emergency bike have been hard work, the bike has good climb gearing but it weighs literally twice as much as i'm used to - hard work indeed, every metre was fought for! So today, with my usual steed back in action, i set out to get back on track.

With not just temperatures still in the 30's but a strong and gusty north easterly wind, it wasn't going to be an easy day by any ranking. I set off a little before nine on a route that looped over the Mendip to Cheddar, up the Gorge to re-cross the Mendip adding a few extra bounces before reaching Brizz once more for the final stretch back to base. It went well, three hours to Cheddar where those expired sandwiches were consumed then three more, wind and heat hindered hours back although that did include a stop for ice cream! 106km but more importantly for the challenge, 1274m of climbing - putting me at 3276m for the month, so about a third of the target so about 5500m spread over potentially 8 more rides - should be a cinch now the main bike is running again.

The hot news for today is of course another chapter, #12, of May Queen, going live. I'm glad you all like it, its always a little daunting writing something so different from what you are known for.

So what this week then? Well if i'm going to keep on target, i have 2.5 Gaby chapters to write this week, hopefully the heat won't disrupt the thought processes too much. I also want/need to get back into doing 'proper' rides again so i foresee adding a goodly number of kilometres and metres to the pot.

To put the riding in context, the table below covers my riding from January 2017 to date, so 9.5 years of my 50 year cycling journey. I'll let you do the sums but its a lot of saddle time!

So that's it, i'll be back on Wednesday but until then,
Tschussie,
Madeline Anafrid