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Great turnout last Tuesday night. No idea as to the head-count but there were definitely four (and sometimes five) in the 'Anti-social' group. Also 12 in the middle 'Social' group. I'm afraid the Super-social group were an unknown quantity to me. Anyone?
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Simon was road-testing (off-road testing, surely?) some of the wiiiiiiiiidest bars we'd ever seen which must have led to some serious shed-door modifications. Clocking-in at a whopping 800-bigass-milimetres, and given that some of the more gnadgery tree-lined singletrack we regularly negotiate in the darkness causes (some) problems for anything over 660mm, these bad-boys were going to take some skillful calibration on his part.... Needless to say they caught him out (at least) twice on the ride, leaving to him pick a load of bracken out of his cables/front wheel on one occasion, and then having a bark/glove interface scenario later on. He proudly showed off his grazed little-finger-knuckles in the pub afterwards. Kudos, Simon.
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His impressive wingspan and colossal bar-width aside, he ably led the four-strong Anti-social group and we all quietly rejoiced that the Noble-ator hadn't shown up for once. Perhaps this could be a nice, 'steady' Anti-social ride for a change. Alas this wasn't to be as en-route to the Allotment, a rider appeared out of the dark heading towards us. It was Chris. Dang.
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Visitor and prospective BCC newbie Rob joined the Anti-social group in a try-before-you-buy capacity. He'd driven from Amesbury (!) just to ride with us so we elected to show him a fair few of the best bits. All was going well until we completely lost him at the end of Transistor. Unbeknownst to the rest of us, he'd taken a minor spill and lost sight of us. He'd turned left towards the road at the end instead of right down the hill. Then, spotting a small red light in the distance, he chased after it. It turned out to be a car... The rest of us retraced our steps and split up to find him. Just before we were about to go to 'Brown Alert', some lights came out of the darkness back from the road and we were a fivesome again. Phew.
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At some point on the return leg the Anti-socials bumped into the Socials and we blended-in seamlessly for a few minutes. I don't think they even noticed we were there.
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General consensus back in the pub was that it had been a great ride, and that it really wasn't as muddy as all that, and that I *may* have painted too bleak a picture re last Sunday's ride. It was REALLY muddy, then, I promise.
awesome picture 😀