After having been exceptionally busy recently riding has taken a back seat. Saturday was spend athome getting things straight and just having a rest. I felt exhausted. I decided that today I would go for a decent ride and somewhere new. Recently a lot has been said about how ace the North York Moors are, so I headed in that direction and wound up at Dalby Forest.
The £7.00 for the day entry fee was an unexpected cost. It is the most I have ever had to pay to gain entry to one of the country’s forest parks. Given how busy it was they must have been coining it in. Anyway I suppose that for the money you also get a useless map, It is absolutely no use in telling you where you are on the trails, so I left it in the car.
I’d taken the singlespeed with me because the Ti Deluxe is still in South African mode and it’s now the only other offroad bike. I headed off on the red and started doing various bits of black. In honesty, the black run wasn’t anything like the Scottish routes in terms of difficulty, but there were some great sections, including a boardwalk section that dropped down a sunken way and a great little bike park with skinnies, 4X course and dirt jump rhythm section.
About 45 minutes into the ride my shorts decided to disintegrate at the seams and I spend the rest of the ride with my saddle wearing my shorts as well as me. It let to some ‘interesting’ moments, ususally on some quite difficult technical bit. Given this I decided to head back to the start and buy some moe shorts. Easy right?
Well it turned out that today there was a British Heart Foundation charity event on, the signage for which confused me because it was so similar to the signage already up for the trails. As a result I ended up riding around for 5 hours (effectively doing the red, the green and all the black bits and spending about 30 minutes in the bikepark at Dixon’s Hollow).
I ran out of drink, but eventually made it back to the cafe at Forest Drive just as they were closing, managing to run over a slow worm sunbathing on a patch of sand on the way. I went back to check the little fella out and he was already slithering off into the undergrowth.
R O T H A R . C O M 