A report of a ride set up on this forum.
This morning Mike, his daughter Madeline (M) and I went for a ride. We had 4 wheels between us as M is only just off stabilers on her bike. Mike has been on one wheel for a few months now, he was on a 24 inch onza muni. While I was on my 26inch Pahley muni, by far the oldest and creakyist of the 3 machines, tho not the heavyisy, M’s little 12 inch wheeled bicycle was the heaveyist by far.
Just as we meet up and headed off the rain started, we decided to ignore it and hope it would go away. It didn’t. We got wet. But as it was a warm day and we kept moving it didn’t matter too much. We pottled down the river exe cycle path, took an option of a gravel track through some fields and reached the Countess wear bascule and swing bridges just as they were being opened to let a large boat through. I’ve driven across those bridges 100s of times in the last 2 years and never seen them open before. we stopped to watch which had the added advantage of allowing M to forget that she couldn’t ride her bike any more after a minor tumble she’d just had.
For the home bound straight we used the tarmaced smooth canal side path. I wonder what the pedestrians thought of us; a disperate group, in the lead a small girl in pink on a tiny purple bike being chased down by myself storming along on a 26, reminding her to stop and wait for your dad, who was valiently bringing up the rear, tired and wet and on the longest unicycle ride of his life so far. One cyclist did slow down to tell us how impressed she was and we didn’t have any nasty comments at all. Mind you it was still raining so there were not too many people about.
We finished our ride at the Riverside Cafe ( the scene of ice cream eating on the June SWUM ride) with tea, hot chocolate and cake, very welcome after 5.5 miles. Then did a little photo shoot with the local paper, this was nothing to do with our ride today, but for a post Unicon story they might be running on me and Paul.
I parted company from Mike and M down on the quay and rode an increasingly wet 3.5 miles home as the rain got heavier and heavier.
I hope they got back to their car before the heavens opened.
Sarah