Another midweek holiday ride squeezed in as an extra, but only Andy and Terry were able to take advantage. This was Wednesday 3rd January 2007 and the weather was semi-dry and still showing the tail end of recent gales. As usual, there's a story. This one started at the end of our last outing at Kielder on 30th December, when Terry found Andy's bike helmet in the boot of his car after unloading the bikes. You'll get the link later. He was due to pick both Andy and Jason up at 10.00am but Jason had to pull out at 7.15am with work commitments.

So he entered his garage around 9.30 to load the bikes, Andy wanting to use the Gollum's Barracuda as his brake pads were shot on the Scott RC30. Now the first thing Golly does after undoing all the locks and chains on his bike hut is to feel the tyres of both bikes. And guess what? Yep, flatty in front Cuda wheel. So, panic at the normally OK coral. Peeling off the front Michelin C6 tyre some minutes later, Terry was surprised to find the contents - a dirty great Nokian Unitube. Now these are one mean inner tube, the Mother of All Tubes in fact. You could put one on a car and it would work fine. He was surprised because he'd forgotten these tyres are 2.5 inch and need a good full tube inside. The big problem, however, was finding another tube that size - they're in the garage somewhere, but... And that was only because the hole was right at the base of the valve so a repair was out of the question. Nothing else for it but to put in a standard tube - the only ones left but at 2.2 inches, not ideal for these big tyres. The upshot of all this was to make Golly even later, and now Andy had been hanging around for ages waiting for his pickup.

So to get back to the plot, the by now sweat-dripping, half-demented Gollum loaded the Cuda and Coiler and hurtled down the road the few miles to Howdon and the awaiting Andy. Time was getting on now, around 10.40, but we still had to go for diesel yet. What a start. Eventually we were wending our way up West headed for Chopwell and praying that it wouldn't be its usual mud pudding self. Half way between Blaydon and Ryton, about 15 miles from home, the Gollum had a sudden blast of realisation. Forgot his helmet. Yes, even though he'd remembered to put Andy's hat in the boot, he'd left in such a tiz that he'd neglected to bring his own!

Now we're both Bikers, and generally do things proper, like. That includes no biking without helmets. Never, EVER go there. On those grounds, Andy immediately suggested we just go back home and forget this seemingly ill-fated ride altogether. Although Golly really appreciated the gesture, there'd been so much hassle getting this far that there was to be no going back. "There's a bike shop at Prudhoe" he remembered. "Bit daft buying a new helmet just for this" retorted Andy. "Nah, he might have a second hand one cheap" ... the conversation went on. About 11.50 we found the Bicycle repair Man at Prudhoe and sure enough he had a fine selection. But it didn't include a second hand one. Bummer. However, just to set the scene... Golly has owned a full face helmet for a couple of years now, and currently it good do with a restoration job. He's also just been given a new Cross Country helmet for Krizzy by the family. In other words, don't do anything stupid like buy another XC hat. But hey, isn't that one of those fancy looking Met Parachutes hanging up there? It was, and although I've always found them strange, it seemed the best way to bring down two birds. On top of that, and probably due to my whinging, he let me have it at a very reasonable price (confirmed on the web as I write this at 7.00pm!).

So we continued the never-ending journey and finally got onto the trails at about 12.15pm. There was a very light drizzle around but nothing was going to stop us now. WE started by riding north from the car park towards the golf course, where we were caught by three youngsters on their little hardtails asking the way to the trails. Must have been their first time here, so we led them down the old Root Trail skirting Broomfield Farm, then east and south down the fireroads to the Freeride track, which is now nicely signposted, but not from the car park! Andy led the four of us down all the way until the kiddies took over for the final singletrack near the foot of the hill. This trail has been given the tag "Powerline Trail" as it follows a line of electricity pylons down through the forest. We had to let the youngsters past as the Gollum was totally knackered, due to the front brake on the ReCoil being jammed on fairly hard. That's what you get for putting wet bikes away for a week or two! It did ease off a bit later, but only when the front brake was completely ignored, which doesn't add to your confidence. We re-wound to the car park again and headed down to the four-section "unofficial" trail which carves its way across three fireroads on its way the the stream below. Again this was surprisingly firm considering the wet weather recently and it was a good blast apart from two or three diversions around fallen trees. At least I got a few short breathers as we shuffled around the blockages.

 Andy loving the Barracuda!

We continued down the edge of the Red Trail valley towards the river at Lintzford Wood. It was here that Golly had a very lucky escape from plummeting down the sheer valley side when his back tyre skipped over the edge of the very thin high trail. Luckily he managed to dig the left hand end of his handlebars into the trail to stop the plunge. Did stretch the old gussets a bit though. We continued down to the river where we stopped for a much needed bite with 5.5 miles on the clocks. Then it was a mixture of push and ride as we got the height back and reached the car park again with the intention of doing the downhill one more time. Gollum led down this time and it was a good run with no dramas, but we curtailed it and two-thirds distance, missing out the newest, bottom section and also the steepest part of the return fireroad because it's a bit exposed to the now very strong blustery wind. At the car we had 7.5 and 7.6 miles on our respective computers, max 21mph and average 6mph, 1hr 17 m mounted time. Still can't understand how dry the place was. Here's a few seconds of Andy starting the Downhill run 1.5MB .wmv vid

 

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