Rediscovering Cycling

When I was a young adult I was a very keen cyclist. For my 18th birthday I got given a really good touring bicycle and I did a lot of miles on it. My friends and I cycled around the Loire Valley for a fortnight after our A levels as a big adventure! I also took part in a couple of London to Brighton bike rides and one London to Oxford one. Then I got a job and bought a car....

My bicycle then spent quite a lot of time sitting in the garage going nowhere. I married and had children and the bicycle sat in my parents' garage as we had no where to put it! Then we moved up to Kendal and my children started learning to ride bicycles themselves:

My son's first solo ride without stabilisers

Unfortunately one is highly confident and one is quite nervous so going out on an actual bike ride is not all that fun unless 2 adults go along. We don't get very far either... So today after having run back home from school run I realised I had a chance to get the bike out of the shed and cycle to work then to go back to my children's school which is about 6 miles from my work via the quieter back lanes. 

The easy bit was to work only 10 minutes away. Then I had to tackle the narrow country lanes with twists and turns and plenty of ups and downs! There were a couple of close calls with vehicles coming very fast the other way... I had a few issues with my gears not changing and then dropping rapidly so I had to give up trying to get up steepest hills as the bike had to stay in middle gears. I did get a chance to see lots of beautiful countryside along the way:

Now I just have to hope that the weather holds so I can do this again and get better at cycling! This is what the Garmin made of my ride: