To Westerham!

Having returned late from Vienna on Friday night I decided to abort the Saturday ride. Andy rode to Godstone Green alone while I lazed around at home. On Sunday I was up around 0600hrs and an hour later I was out and heading for Warlingham Green.

Westerham around 0800hrs, Sunday 4th September 2016

"Westerham?"

Why not? So off we went. We made it in 30 minutes from the green, not bad going, and sat down at the wooden table to enjoy our tea and biscuits while we chatted about a programme Andy had watched on the Discovery Channel. A guy with a beard cycled around the UK coastline from Devon to Scarborough on a bike made out of bamboo and then he jogged from Scarborough to Brighton before swimming in the sea back towards Devon, making a complete circle of the country. But there were issues with the bike. He'd decided to ship over a bike made of bamboo in Asia with a view to being right on and saving the planet, but Andy figured it was a silly idea. For a start the bike had some kind of malfunction: the wheels were out of alignment, but he still rode it all the way around the country, clockwise, to Scarborough. Andy said he'd have been saving the planet more if he'd not had the bike shipped halfway across the world and burning all those fossil fuels in the process. He had a point. Why didn't he go to Evan's Cycles, get himself a top-of-the-range hybrid, like my Specialized Crosstrail Sport Disc, and ride that instead?

I wanted to watch the programme and hoped upon hope that it was on terrestrial TV, but it wasn't, it was on the Discovery Channel, Andy later texted me.

A big fat bloke dressed in Lycra arrived in a huge black van from which he took a racing bike and joined a group of cyclists congregating outside the Westerham Cyclery. "Some people eat more than they exercise," I said, munching a Belvita biscuit.

The weather was good, although we thought we might get rained on, but we didn't. On the return ride we noticed that the hay bales had gone, the ones we used in the post about summer leaving the building. Summer really is fading fast, we're now in September and while it's still tee-shirts and no gloves weather, the rain and the wind and the sleet and the snow will soon be heading our way. When we reached the 269 there was a blustery wind blowing, but it didn't stop us racing the length of the road before slowing as we hit the Limpsfield Road and suburbia. Alright, a slight exaggeration: we just overtook each other occasionally, nothing fancy, but it was good fun and now that I've got a lighter bike, it feels good.

We're on for a ride next week, both days hopefully, and we parted company on that note. I rode further down the Limpsfield Road, down Church Way and home.