Pyro's Yard v2.0

After a fitful nights sleep, punctuated by one of our room's occupants getting up to go to the loo, one snoring, one farting and one making the bunk creak every time he rolled over, we got up. At this juncture I should probably point out that we were sharing a 3-bed family room, and let you try and figure out to whom each of those four categories applies. YHA breakfasts are as they were way back when I worked in the YHA - basic, stodgy, cheap and very much worth it. Geoffrey and I split the last bit of Black Pudding, since apparently the lady booking the breakfasts at reception had got the numbers a bit wrong. Ross got extra veggie sausage, and declined the black pudding - strange that. And there was plenty of cereals and toast available to plug the gaps around the fryup, if so required. We so required, plugged said gaps, donned our best (or second-best) lycra and got the bikes ready for the off. Before we offed, we also donned our best waterproofs, since the morning was, frankl...

It's been a good while since I did anything in the way of long-haul cycling. There's been a fair bit of commuting to work, but that's only a handful of miles each way. There's been a few short MTB rides over the winter. Aside from that, the last time I did any serious riding was the 12hrs of Exposure  and since then, I've just been bimbling. So when Dad came out with the plan to ride the Hadrian's Cycleway, it seemed like something that would probably kill me. The full route is 174 miles, Ravenglass to South Shields (or Glannaventa to Arbeia, if you're pretending to be a Roman) , but with only a weekend we decided Bowness-on-Solway (Maia) was the better start point. Apparently, this is the actual western end of Hadrian's Wall itself, and the rest down to Ravenglass an extension, the Western Sea Defence, plus for our purposes, it brought the first distance estimate to a nice round 100 miles. And cleverly remembering the old adage that 'misery loves...