It was a
beautiful morning. I got bread, milk and eggs from the Post Office opposite the YHA
and with the bits of butter, jam and cereal we had filched from the Campanial
Hotel we had a great breakfast.
We found a
bus timetable in the YHA and saw that there was a tripper bus going through
Slaidburn across the Forest of Bowland to Hawes in the Yorkshire Dales. We
walked down the village to the cafe, where the bus stopped, and fell into
conversation with a motorbiker who had ridden up there that morning from
Bolton.
When the bus arrive we discovered were going to be the
youngest on it by at least a decade. It bowled through the lanes at a
tremendous speed, stopping occasionally long enough for us to get off and have
a walk around. We went past the Ribblehead viaduct and arrived in Hawes for
lunch. It was full of motorcyclists – I mean really hundreds of them.
The roads were also full of cyclists - somethimes singly, sometimes in small groups, but often in large packs of ppeople cleraly racing. In one of those we saw a dozen or so riders on top notch carbon fibre bikes and one on a Raleigh small-wheeled shoper bike. He was going like the clappers down hill but we saw him later struggling to get up an incline. He muist have been doing it for a bet - why else woudldyou put yourself through it?
We wandered
around, looking in shops - which were mostly of the outdoor cltohing and equipment type - and then had a very decent lunch in a pub. We nearly
missed the only bus back as it had changed both its number and its destination, but Pete
persuaded me to go and ask and it was the right one.
We got back and I fiddled with my bike – lubricating and
tightening – and then came some great news. A fellow cyclist was doing the
end-to-end with a friend in a support car. They were heading for the saem place as uss teh next day and would carry our luggage. Great news! We would both be about ten pounds lighter.
We went back to the pub, now almost empty, and had a very
decent dinner with two pints of beer and were in very high spirits.
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