Bike Riced

Mrs O and I went for a weekend away en vélo over Easter.  We popped our folding bikes on the train and trundled up to Cambridge on Good Friday to commune with the hundreds of thousands of Chinese tourists who had made the trip also.  It actually wasn't so bad in Cantab.  The students are at home (the normal ones, at any rate), which helped a bit.  We steeled ourselves by spending the night there and heading off the following morning, a massive complimentary buffet breakfast to the good.

The first few miles were great; well-appointed cycle paths take you right out into the mercifully-flat Cambridgeshire countryside.  It's quite dull, the landscape here, but good for low-octane cyclisme.  The trouble only starts when you get to Essex.

The physical geography of Essex is the absolute inverse of Cambridgeshire's.  The whole county appears to have been corrugated by a malevolent god.  It was massively hard going.  Mrs O had planned this first day to be 35 miles of bucolic bike jollies.  Five and half hours later, we pitched-up in Great Dunmow, utterly broken.  We must have cycled closer to 55 miles, what with the peaks and troughs.  As a consequence of this unforeseen extra effort, we spent the evening eating and drinking with abandon.  That's the quid pro quo of arduous cycling, and one of the pasttime's joys of course.  

After a mighty chug of Chenin Blanc and a slap-up Vietnamese dinner, we both slept like sedated babies, and lept out of bed, ready for the miles ahead.  Unfortunately, the weather undid us.  Literally as we were leaving the carpark of our hotel, Mrs O detected a spot of rain.  It then opened-up for ooh, let's see, the next nine hours solid.

The plan had been to ride all the way home, but by the time we reached the quaint end of the Central Line, I hoisted the white flag.  We jumped on a tube and headed to my sister's house, which is nearby.  We threw ourselves on her mercy.  She did the needful and filled us up with tea and hot cross buns.  She popped the tin hat on it by then offering us a lift home.