Ride, ride, ride, ride.

It's a Bank Holiday weekend. The sun is out. Conditions offroad are about as good as they get (especially around here); beech leaves are that budfresh® acid green, great lakes of bluebells in every copse, dirt dry with enough dust to leave a rime around socks and shorts, wildlife in abundance and apparently as drunk with the excessive loveliness of it all as I am. Better ride then.

Helping friends move and chores at home keep me sensibly out of the sun during the hours that a Southern peely wally like me ought to be and riding is fitted into every other daylight orifice.

Time is made to sniff out new trails (and today, lanes) and old places not visited recently enough. A visit to see friends (fellow VCMers Gareth and Lisa) in Surrey means a jaunt around stupidly fun trails there too followed by beers and chilli in front of Liege-Bastogne-Liege (Mr Gilbert's having a good week, eh?).

To top it off, today I meandered over to the Thames on lanes mostly known and some nose-followed. One memorably so little used as to have singletrack on either side of a mossy bank down the centre leading to two-inch deep pea-gravel-wash-off at the bottom. Should make an appearance on the Chill-ton, that one...

Thoroughly decompressed.