Dark Satanic hills

To borrow the football commentator's cliche, yesterday was a ride of two halves.  We'll describe them in a minute, but we should start by welcoming another Tom, this time Adam's old university friend, who has joined us for two days. Tom had previous where long distance cycling's concerned, having been with Adam on their epic cycle from Bangkok to Singapore, in support of the tsunami victims.

The first half of yesterday's mini epic was all about getting out of the Manchester conurbation. The towns rolled by: Bury, Rochdale, Accrington. A roll call of lower league football towns, with their ex-workers' cottages lining the way and strange modern British adjacencies like The Butty Shop right next door to Zainab's Indian takeaway.

We lunched in Whalley Abbey grounds, in one of the last towns before open countryside began. Up to then, the hills had been modest, but after Clitheroe we were immediately into endless, brutal hill climbs up into dales country. At one point Tom Lee's saddle came off for no apparent reason, giving us some respite while it was fixed, before resuming the climb over beautiful deserted moorland. After well over an hour of climbing, we finally got to the top of the ridge and whizzed down the other side, giggling like kids. James' speedo toched 40 miles an hour, which, on those roads, was quite a white knuckle ride.

About three miles from Ingleton, Adam's bike gave out and we had to walk and free wheel to our destination, a very pretty Dales' village. Amazingly, there is a bike shop opposite. Our traditional start to the day...

Incidentally, we are getting requests of a more, er, prurient nature for these blog entries. The general tone of these is along the lines of "enough of this geographical whimsy and feeble attempt at travelogue, give us the anatomical horrors."    Well, the news is that the fabled Assos cream (Google it if you don't know what we're talking about), is doing a spectacular job. The bigger issue is aching quads, especially after days lime yesterday. Deep Heat and beer have become the medicines of choice, and they seem to deal with most problems. All in all, could be much worse.