Sunday 29th July 2007. Holidays and work hitting hard just now meant a trio of MidAirMen (sorry Keith, I mean Newcastle MTB Club Men!) were available. Keith and Terry met in Forest Hall at 9.30 am and drove up to Cramlington to collect Derek. The expected extra couple of bodies failed to materialise, but who knows, they may appear next weekend or Thursday night.

Now although these rides are MidAirCrisis affairs, to be fair to Keith and any other new riders, he actually joined the new Newcastle Mountain Bike Club and that's theoretically the bunch he's out with. Of course, it's very difficult to divorce the two entities so I probably won't bother trying. This site is essentially a rolling record of all of our rides in as much detail as I can recall. The NMBC site is a "clean front end" for new riders to enable them to start riding with us in the hope of creating something big and useful in the future, because there's never been a dedicated Newcastle area mountain bike club. Just thought I'd explain to Reader 2.

We trolled off up the A1 on a sunny, windy and cool morning, taking the A697 at Morpeth then onto the B6344 to Rothbury. Lost count of the motorcyclists zooming along these twisty bits, especially coming back again. Wonder how many survived? As we crawled discreetly into Alwinton the Gollum was also thinking about survival, being under threat from the female at home to return safely for the upcoming holiday, and not to do anything remotely dangerous. Well, Derek was certainly to get us to the remote bit and also present a fair bit of danger along the way.

We headed out of the village at 11.05 am, south bound then east into the greenery, criss-crossing National Cycle Route 68 as we went . There was a severe climb about half an hour out pulling us up onto the moors and that's just about as far as my directional memory can tell you about - should have taken the GPS! This is a well-established ride and one Derek has done many times in the past. Today he managed to tailor it perfectly to a small group (yep, 3), one of which had to get back home before tea to get ready for the hols.

This is in a wood, invisible! Wonder when this box was last emptied?

 

Derek and Keith just visible at foot of downhill below

And even more superb singletrack and dual to come!

Bit of tricky stream crossing Excellent piece of peace as we stopped for lunch in paradise, but who threw that? And where the heck are we? Toys

Look at this view, will you?

There was another mighty climb half an hour from the end which took us from the road through the valley up onto Clennell Street for a nice downhill finish. Between those two were some fantastic stretches of singletrack through ferns with tricky edges alongside steep drops. We stopped for lunch at a midge-free stream in perfect calm and tranquillity, watching a big old Bird of Prey hovering over it's intended prey before changing it's mind and floating away silently to look for more. Only the rattling of Derek's map spoiled the total calm.

 The final climb Derek clears the awkward start and so does Keith

 The Gollum pushed. This is why -

 

Terry's bike PC said max 29.1mph, ave 6.0 mph, 10.46 mls, 1hr 44mins rolling. These may be wrong!!! However, it was an excellent ride with enough hard climbing work to keep a manic depressive happy and enough downhill danger to keep a Gollum in hospital.

Keep watching and if you fancy a ride out with us, drop us a line here: bailout@midaircrisis.org.uk