We spent a weekend around Newcastle building a new bannister in Sarah's house but also managed to fit in a trip to Teesdide, a bike ride out at Haydon bridge, a takeaway and a meal at the pub for Lou's birthday.
We spent the bank holiday weekend in North Wales with friends from Sheffield, Newcastle and Sarahs brother Tom. On the Saturday, we had really good weather for climbing Snowdon up Crib Goch and back down via Y Lliwedd. We finished the walk to discover Alex had put the steering lock on the car but left the key to it on the campsite, so we all sat in the pub while Tom drove Alex back to fetch it. The evening was rounded off by a BBQ and beers.
On Sunday we spent the day the river Tryweryn.
And on Monday, the sheffielders went and rode the Marin trail (in the rain!) while the Newcastle lot went to Stanley embankment for some hard core play boating before negotiating an 8 hour drive home - of which 4 hours was sat in a traffic jam in Wales!
The following weekend we went up to south west scotland for a weekend of mountain biking. Jenny and JP finally made it down to the cottage some time in the middle of the night - its still not clear whether this was because it is just a long long way from Inverness or whether JP was just acquainting himself with the more rural parts of southern scotland. We rode 2 of the 7 stanes singletrack routes - Kirroughtree and Dalbeattie. Both are excellent single track rides, made even better by the sunny weather than seemed to be localised only over this region!!!
Despite both Jenny and JP managing to throw themselves off their bikes and on to the rocks, everyone made in round all 50 km that we rode over the 2 days - including hard core dog Sam. Despite having Sam for only abour 6 months, Jenny and JP have managed to train him to run along side the bike at heel, even when racing along at 20 + miles per hour!!!!!!!!!More pics can be found here, here and here.
