Why is it the Big Weather always rolls in at the furthest end of a long ride? You get as far as it’s possible to get, from the van, or from home, and suddenly the hills behind you disappear in a white wall of hail. There’s no choice but to press on and get on with it. After all, you’ll get home, warm up and it will have been fun, right? Had the squall hit as you left the house, you’d probably have had a much, much shorter ride.
On our ride at the weekend, we’d been out for an hour or two and arrived at a junction. There was the shorter, steeper way home, or the much longer but less travelled route round ‘the back of that hill over there, no… the one behind it’. David decided that we wanted to go the longer way, so we chose the longer way, even though it was into the wind and towards the darker clouds – and it was at that furthest point that the weather trundled in. We hid behind a parked van and added a layer or two in the wind and started on the homeward leg.
PICTURE BY ROB