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Sunday 4th March and only John and Terry available. As the only two out of all the MidAirCrisis crew (all?) and the Reivers squad who ever take notice of weather forecasts, they decided to avoid the west of Northumberland and the south of Scotland and did a nice flat gentle local loop instead. Starting at John's place in Cramlington they rode north for a bit then west for a bit then south for a bit then east for a bit more.

Amazingly, that put them back at John's with 18.7 miles on the bike PC, 27.5mph max, 9.7mph average and 1 hr 55min rolling time.

Nothing much else to report, really, except that they both enjoyed it and stopped for a break about half way around at the old Stannington Hospital, here -

and the artistic shot

Actually, there is one item worthy of mention. You'll remember, dear reader, that I had put Slime in my tyres a few months ago as an experiment. And that I got a front puncture a fortnight ago (see here). Well, all I did was blow it up again (it didn't flatten completely) and so far, I'm happy to report it's stayed up. So Thumbs Up for Slime, sez the Gollum. Thinking about it, the tyre was almost sure to deflate some as the slime is inside the inner tube, and has to see air before it coagulates and blocks the hole. It must have taken a while for it to find what it recognised as air inside the tyre and when it did - Bingo!

Oh, and one other thing. Whilst heading north as above, we got to the A1 slip road into Morpeth and Golly decided to head straight under the A1 towards Whitehouse Farm. So he skipped across the southward carriageway coming out of Clifton and then proceeded to skip over the northward one onto the footpath. When he arrived on  the footpath, with John right on his tail, the old fool realised he'd just crossed a DOUBLE, TWO-WAY carriageway and seconds later would have been wiped out by a car travelling south! This was as close as the Gollum has come to causing his own demise on a road, so he's now very lucky to be almost alive. Perhaps next Sunday's ride should be well away from traffic just to get the old brain back in gear again.