Day 4 – Keld – Ingleby Cross Usual start to the day, up for breakfast at 8 and a quick consultation with Tony about our best route. He recommends the lower trail which means we can avoid carrying the bikes again, but does mean I miss the chance to revisit my campsite when I did the walk 5 years ago. A happy sacrifice when the recommended route turned out to be so fantastic. It’s all downhill today and the first 5 miles are all mountain bike territory, woot! As we get to the first village, Muker our trail begins to climb up in to the mountains so decide to make the choice now to take the road for 9 miles in to Reeth to make sure we get in early tonight. I’m not a fan of the roads but this was a great road to be cycling! As we descend out of the Dales we pass through tiny own that seem unchanged for 100’s of years, all still old stone buildings with very little modernisation, it was actually pretty cool, plus the area was absolutely packed full of pheasants. When we arrived in Reeth at 11 we popped in to a wee café that I recognised from before for a hot chocolate and a scone. Turned out the woman running the place was completely crazy, felt a little sorry for her as she really had no idea what was going on, but something about the whole scenario was hilarious. She eventually managed to serve the two occupied tables in some very strange fashion but did forget a scone. Out of Reeth and we’re heading for Richmond, determined to stick to Wainwrights trail for the rest of the day. It’s pretty amazing how accepting the farmers are of the right to roam here as the path would just pass straight through the middle of field after field. This did mean we had to climb in the region of about 40 styles today but it was class, even if it did slow us down. In Richmond we were well ahead of time so had a proper wee meal in a local pub. Then we were to follow the river again and turn left. For some reason I took us right, up a sizeable climb and right back in a circle to where we started. The first time I’ve messed up the navigation this trip, it was only about a mile detour. After Richmond it was all very straight forward, flat riding across fields and bridleway with the odd bit of single track which made for a great days biking. Despite the saddle sores, but we’re still trying to ignore them. It was about 3:30 when the drizzle started and the head wind, what a killer. The rain only got worse from there so I decided to put on my cycle jacket. With the jacket I’ve adopted the image of pro, we do this all the time and know exactly what we’re doing, we ain’t just a pair of muppets trudging across England, we’ve actually got this! Haha the last few miles flew by and we met a workman along the way who was very eager to talk to us about cycling the C2C. Apparently he sees hundreds of people go past every day and we’re the first on bikes, why does everyone seem to think cycling this route is mad? We got in to Ingleby Cross around 18:00 after crossing one hectic road, we’d wondered why on the map it said DANGER TAKE CARE and it was because of this massive dual carriage way that was extremely busy. We got across no problem but had to call Somerset hour, our B&B to get a few directions as it was a little out of the way. Once we arrived we were shown to our swanky barn conversion while dad chatted up the owner about his carp. A short walk down to the local pub for dinner turned into a 30 minute expedition due to us getting pretty lost, this may have been my fault again. We finally made it to the Blue Bell Inn for dinner around 7:30 where we had a few pints with some other guys walking the trail before finally heading back to the B&B. It was a bit more interesting in the dark as we couldn’t see the road, but we made it! Today was a good day, we stayed on the bikes, followed Wainwright for the vast majority and managed some half decent mountain biking! Tomorrow we hope to finish this journey, we sit right on the edge of the North York Moors now, can’t wait to see what Mr Wainwright has in store tomorrow.
Posted on: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 20:57:59 +0000
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