🙁
Met with some pals for our first ever trip to Dalbeattie. Been to Laggan / Glentress / Innerleithan before so I thought the red would be fine. Wrong!
Took a big fall early on on one of the granite outcrops – bridged the tandem and left stranded in the air resulting in a heavy fall which meant my bottle escaped!.
Still – really great trails – much narrower and more “natural” than the other trail centres – no lumps of rock put in the way to make a dull trail interesting – instead using the natural features of the landscape and taking the trail interesting routes over them.
No way were we going to attempt the slab as we were still looking for our bottle at that point. We did recover it later on the ride however and cleared some stuff that just did not look possible.
I have never felt so beat up after a ride tho – shoulders and hands sore from the effort needed to control 30 stone of us and long bike over all the rocks.
The bike held up well – just a load more hits on the bashrings – at GT we rarely hit them – at Dalbeatie we must have done so 20 times. Some of the obstacles could have been tackled easier with more speed – but the penalties for getting it wrong would have been more severe.
2 falls and 3 submissions ( chickening out and walking short sections) Dalbeatie won! But we will be back for the return match and out for revenge! Time to jack the bike up another few inches