Category: Cardinal Spins

We had a lovely time in Durham. It wasn’t difficult: the weather was superb and the cathedral alone kept us busy for several hours, with an ascent onto the roof of the central tower, and then lunch from the undercroft refectory. We discovered tables outside in the sun right underneath the two Norman towers of […]

I awoke in my fancy Otley apartment to a soupy sort of day. It was dry, and largely remained so, but hard to see the hills very distinctly. That didn’t make them any easier to climb, of course, and there was plenty of that today, especially in the morning. Most of the rivers of Yorkshire […]

It was time, the spinner said, for me to cycle north in a straight line until I reached the sea in Northumberland. From an OS maps point of view, this was an easier route to plot, because – just like my route south – it was already printed on the map by the OS as […]

I almost reached the coast in two big days; but family comes first, so I had a little bit left to do today before I could begin my personal tour of the English rail network to get back home. It was another cracking day of warm sunshine and I was in no hurry. I retraced […]

Yesterday was 102 miles of cycling in the sun, and today looked like being slightly more. I had a deadline of sorts: I was due to visit a long lost cousin in deepest Suffolk, and I wanted to arrive at a civilised hour in time for dinner and spend some time together. So I told […]

The magic spinner span, and this time it chose the straight line to the Suffolk coast, heading ESE just over two hundred miles to, well, Sizewell B Nuclear Power Station! There is a lovely beach there, too, however, with a cafe and everything; so let’s just call it Sizewell and be done with it. It’s […]

With some reluctance I left Salisbury behind after a quick Pret breakfast in its impressively large and almost completely empty market square. It was a sunny day, a good one to be out on a bike. I had a 30 mile ride to complete, and a train back to London, where I would ride across […]

I awoke to sunshine in the upper Thames valley and decided that I was still too full from last night’s sumptuous pub meal to justify their breakfast as well. It needed riding off for an hour or two. I was otherwise running to a roughly Tamworth schedule, which meant I should actually be slightly ahead […]

I awoke in my Tamworth pub room to a grey, drizzly morning. Not what I ordered. The day was due to improve, but not yet. I didn’t really fancy getting wet if I could help it. So I faffed around and took my time leaving, and then made it just a few doors down the […]

The magic spinner sent me south on a day of strong winds from the west. It wasn’t a good idea to be out on a bike during the latter stages of Storm Lilian, but by lunchtime things had died down a bit. The roads were covered in bits of tree that had fallen in the […]