Well, that didn't exactly go as expected.
I drove over to Tring to meet Dr Nick at the station as planned. He was slightly delayed by a 20mph headwind along the canal from Aylesbury, so we set off just under an hour behind schedule, heading for Wendover and the Cafe in the Woods. It was very windy, steady rain and cold. Not desperately cold, just cold.
All went well for an hour or so, despite my Garmin turning itself off at random moments, and we only really made one navigational error before getting to the cafe around 3.30pm.
Annoyingly, while we were getting warm and dry inside, outside the light had well and truly gone and the weather took a big turn for the worse. But fortified by tea and cake, we buckled up and set forth into the teeth of the storm. Well, almost. There was a slight delay for Nick to fix his flat front tyre. Not a quick job with 4.8in rubber on his lovely Cannondale fat bike, but we were on our way soon enough.
Away we went, down past the Gruffalo and along the main trail. A mile later, my satnav misbehaved again and we went off piste for a bit, ending up at the bottom of a very grim climb. The rain was heavy now, and the road like a stream, with sheets of water ripping down, filling our boots and generally making this bikepacking thing less than fun.
Eventually it levelled out and we were back on track. And here we had a decision to make. It was now 5pm and our table was booked for 630, which we were not going to make. Do we continue on with another 15 or so miles of Chilterns muck and freezing rain, or maybe we might just consider the possibility of tucking our tales in and head back to the start?
No brainer. 30 minutes later we were back at Tring Station, loading the bikes into my car. Another 30 minutes and we were at the pub in Askett, sat at a table in the warm, dry, cosy bar. The temp gauge on the car had shown -2deg but stepping out the gale in our damp clothes, it felt much colder.
For a posh(ish) pub, a few of the locals had a certain "Deliverance" quality to them (duelling banjos anyone?) though the achingly lovely waitress was more than compensation for their loud voices and rather stern views on immigration, whether you should feed a dog Twiglets and the current East Enders storyline. Thankfully they eventually left, the food came, the conversation flowed and we put the world to rights.
After we'd eaten waaay too much we headed over to Sam's field. When we arrived, we found the roundhouse already warm with a fire in the stove and a couple of paraffin lamps making it very welcoming indeed. Thank you Sam, you are a proper gentleman.
The evening passed uneventfully and the weather improved as the night wore on. We were up early, I dropped Nick home and am now on my sofa, very pleased to have made the decision to bale. I can do Type 2 fun, but last night was most definitely Type 3, and I know when I'm beat.
Thanks Nick, as always, for great company. See you in 2019. Trusting everyone else who was out and about in no doubt worse conditions than we had, got through it safe and well.
. Although admittedly in this case the splitters group seems much bigger than the split-off-from group!
VERY sweary job, sounds nice and quite on tick over now