Pat Yourself on the Back When Appropriate

Day three started with a full English Breakfast and then the successful removal, undetected, of my bike from our bedroom to join the other bikes in the road outside the B&B.  If memory serves Scott, who can move a lot quicker and is stronger than I, undertook to move the bike downstairs.  Once it was with the other bikes, I assumed a, “nothing to see here” mode, hoping that the owner of the B&B wouldn’t notice there was one more bike out the front of his emporium than he had, the night previously, locked up in a garage round the back.

There is little doubt that Moretonhampstead is a pretty little Devonshire town nestling as it does in the folded hills that surround it and which make up part of the charm of Dartmoor.  I have visited it on many occasions in the past when on holiday in Devon and at one time stayed with the local Baptist Minister who was a friend from my college days at LBC.  Spending a couple of days with him gave me a chance to have a good look round.  Being a town dweller for most of my life and used to being surrounded by a fairly vibrant night life, Moretonhampstead seemed to more or less die after about 6pm.  A few pubs stayed open but everything else shut down.  Curiosity got the better of me and so I asked my clerical friend what people did for entertainment in the evening if they didn’t want to go to the pub.  His answer was succinct, to put it mildly, and somewhat disturbingly, “incest!”

Chuckling to myself about this conversation with my friend all those years ago, I wondered what effect all this inbreeding might have had on the dwellers of Moretonhampstead.  Presumably it would involve a high risk of intellectual impairment. Whist I mused on such matters I hit the first challenge of the day which put an end abrupt end to my somewhat Freudian fantasy.  I rounded a corner on the outskirts of town, just thinking to myself that as the place I was leaving did not seem to be peopled by bumbling village idiots, perhaps the good folk of Moretonhampstead had found other evening distractions, when the road rose up before me in a manner so alarmingly steep that I ground to a halt.  Quickly, I switched the bike into rocket mode and hit the pedals.  Up I went even managing to catch up with and in some cases overtake the others.  We grouped up at the top of this long and arduous ascent.  “What goes up must come down”, as the old saying goes and this was certainly true that morning.  From the brow of the hill where we all met up there was a long and extremely fast descent towards Exeter.  The daredevils amongst us took off at what seemed to me a near suicidal pace.  I must confess that anything over twenty-five miles an hour feels extremely dangerous to me and causes me to apply the brakes.  I also tend to feel a little resentful about having sweated my way up a long climb to then descend knowing that I will only have to climb again sooner or later.

We negotiated our way through the city of Exeter quite quickly as it is not particularly large as cities go, stopping for lunch in the car park of the same pub we had used on previous rides.  The pre-lunch riding was more or less flat, easy and pleasant going.  The only snag was Adam managed to get lost which initiated frantic phone calls to him to get him back on track.

Quite soon after first lunch we encountered the biggest challenge of the day for man and bike, Broadhembury Hill, a beast of a climb.  With the bike on rocket mode, putting out 250 watts, it was still hard work to make it to the top. I have never been able to ride up the entirety of this climb before and climbing it that day featured as a major achievement as far as I was concerned and I was very pleased with myself.  I think it is very important, when you finally manage to succeed in a mastering a difficult challenge, whatever that may be, to pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself in much the same way that you would congratulate a friend on a fine achievement.

Scott had more problems with his bike earlier in the day which necessitated another trip to a bike repair shop. He joined the ride at the top of Broadhembury Hill and had to put up with some blokey jibes about how he had managed to miss the major climbing challenge of the day.  Once rested we pressed on only to find another challenge later in the afternoon which none of us could have predicted.

Four Legged Danger Round Every Bend

I used the motor on my bike quite a bit during today’s ride due to the endless hills.  I was still trying to work out just how to use the assist so that I would not run the battery completely flat and be left peddling a bike that was, unassisted, heavier than my old racing bike.  This would have been counterproductive to say the least.  I found that if I ran the motor on first assist, I could easily keep up with the others on the flat.  This became particularly important when it came to negotiating the endless traffic light systems going out of Exeter where we really needed to stay together.  I also found that in first mode I could do most of the climbs and I could use the second mode or the third and aptly named, “rocket mode”, on the steepest hills. This experiment with the motor was extremely successful as the battery just about lasted the entire day.  It was however, in terms of mileage, a short day and I wondered about the longer days which lay ahead.

The real drag of a climb came after second lunch and involved climbing up to Princetown in the heart of Dartmoor.  However, with my trusty steed on “Rocket Mode” I got up this climb much quicker and enjoyed the experience much more than on the previous two times I have ridden it.

As on the previous two LEJOGs the weather on day two was excellent for those who could take the heat and, once more, we got to see Dartmoor at its best.  Any of you reading this blog who have seen Dartmoor in sunshine will know that its stark beauty is ravishing.  There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that a combination of beautiful countryside and sunshine raises the spirit. This no doubt has a physiological as well as a psychological effect on human perception.  Sunlight on the whole is good for you, unless it is too strong and ends up burning your skin, providing as it does much needed vitamin D.  But, expose yourself to its extremes without sun block and you run the risk of skin cancer.  Beautiful countryside is another matter.  It is questionable that you can get too much of it unless it is suddenly obliterated as the mist descends or it start suddenly raining as is often to case on Dartmoor.  Under such circumstances the beauty is masked and the whole experience can take on quite a sinister aspect.  It is as if one has gone from the idyll of Eden and been viciously cast back into pre-creation chaos.  Not a pleasant experience as we were to find out much later in our fourteen-day ride.

On that balmy, sunny day, when Dartmoor was showing off her resplendent beauty, other dangers lurked beside the road.  Danger on four legs to be precise. I had a brush with a couple of suicidal sheep who suddenly decided to run out in front of me at the last moment as I was about to pass them by.  Of course, it is just possible that this was a desperate attempt by the woolly mafia to unseat an intruder on their patch.  I started to see the possibility of myself crashing to the deck and being set upon by a couple of vicious rams who would do both me and my bike some serious damage.  Now reader, you might think at this point that I was seriously deluded, perhaps too much sun, even paranoid and in need of professional help, but as Adam once said, “just because I am paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after me!”

Well you will be pleased to hear that I made it to Moretonhampstead in one piece and the need to have a hearty evening meal drove such demented thoughts as those expressed above from my mind.  However, before we could eat, we had the business of getting the bike up to our bedroom.  Julia, who was clearly racked with guilt concerning the necessity for subterfuge, was muttering things about the lovely decor of the B and B and what a nice man it was who owned it.  Well to cut a long story short we got the bike upstairs and on charge without being spotted.  The B and B at Moretonhampstead certainly was without doubt wonderful and worlds away from the Back Packers Hostel where we stayed on the last two LEJOGs.  No ageing, depressed hippies and feral cats to contend with this time round.  And Julia was right, the owner of the B and B was a sweetie.    We were booked into an Italian restaurant for our evening meal. Real Italian food in the middle of Dartmoor, what a welcomed find. Scott was much better by the evening and joined us for the meal which was a relief for me as I had been really worried about him earlier in the day.