@jimmy748 love this! Haven’t been up there for years but my great uncle used to own it (the airfield, not the spitfire) and my grandad was an instructor out of there for 30 years. Good inspiration for a ride up there, thank you.

This sounds great. I love riding through central London. The suburbs out towards the m25 where the roads start turning into 40+ mph are awful, but I’d ride around town all day if I could. Might steal your idea!

Slightly weird looking link above, sorry not sure what happened – it does take you to the right place though!

Home

Loved that. Glad they went all out comedy. There’s some dust in my eye.

I have the 40mm standard version and they come up big (41.5) on my JRA rims.

They are however brilliant – tubeless seal first time, they give a feeling of fast rolling on both gravel and road, seem pretty robust. So much better than the previous iteration.

Isn’t that the bit that’s marked as “nettle alley” or something like that on their official route map? Sounds like they’ve understated that a bit!

OP this is not self incrimination. Self incrimination is when you make statements that may incriminate yourself. This is just evidence – it’s no different to the police seizing as evidence a knife with the fingerprints on it or the falsified accounting records kept on a hard-drive.

Agreed. A load of people all on top of their game all at the same time. Mesmerising television.

Absolute genius

you’re welcome to my train strike hack:

– book parking at Asda in Hayes & Harlingdon via the your parking space app. Loads of spaces any time of day. £5ish to park all day

– 3 mins walk to Elizabeth line

– £10 ish return: much cheaper than catching the train from outside the m25

– try not to buy and eat a bag of donuts when you get back to Asda. I’m still working on this one myself

Alma, Scale or 2 stroke?

Will be interesting to see if the current government’s policy of funding early stage design of small nuclear ever leads to anything tangible. Rolls Royce and Hitachi seem to be taking it seriously.

Nice! I went to the chocolate factory between rides :-)

Winchester is great tbh, but only because of the riding and the coffee

This is totally irrelevant but I drove from Winchester to Newton Stewart and back last week. 7 hours each way. Worth it. It’s a bloody brilliant part of the world. Already booked my next trip back for raiders gravel in August.

anyway hope it all comes together for you.

Edit: the train to Weymouth goes from Brockenhurst or Sway, both of which is an easy ride from lymington, or you can get the branch line from lymington to brockenhurst and change.

You could stay in lymington, which has both easy access to the new forest and also the ferry terminal to Yarmouth.

from there you can also ride west along mainly gravel paths in the Bournemouth direction and eventually to the chain ferry for the isle of Purbeck.

I’d also highly recommend getting an early train to Weymouth and riding back to base along the Jurassic coast path. In the sunshine, that has to be one of the finest off road bike rides in the world

Thanks very much everyone. Love this forum. Some great ideas to choose from

Bradford upon Avon. Great little place

Thank you – yeah did consider that but would like to get a bit further up the country I think

Took the VC Venta club gravel ride out on Saturday as far as Beacon Hill – there were 35 of us. all completely fine.

When you realise you’ve blown your entire CGI budget in the first three episodes so have to shelve your plans for an epic D Day episode and instead have to the tell the story from the perspective of a bloke who inexplicably slept through the whole thing

I ran the bit between winchester and broughton and back yesterday and basically came back with trench foot

This was posted on Facebook half an hour ago:

“I have been running the bike workshop for WiggleCRC for the last 2.5/3 years …. sadly its came to an end for us all , if anyone needs or knows of anyone who needs some experienced bike mechanics I can put in touch with 20+ of some of the best …MTB experts  , Roadie fanatics and all rounders and even an old rockstar who’s built 98% of the ebikes that’s came through ,who also does Rod Stewart tributes to keep you entertained. Also a badass MHE driver who can drive anything and is more of a machine than the trucks he operates…..They’ve all achieved some great things and accomplished every hurdle along the way and this sad news is nothing to do with these legends they’ve smashed everything thrown at them.”

Praying for the victims of this appalling crime and my thoughts are with the injured and my friends and everyone else in KC that will be forever traumatised by witnessing it.

In bits this morning. The tension and emotion of that was unreal. If you’d promised me that back in December when I was freezing my nads off in the “cheap” seats at arrowhead watching us lose to the Bills I’d never have believed you.

we did it the hard way all through the play offs. Fitting for Mecole to win it after what he went through last year.

really shouldn’t have opened that Laphroig at the end though. First drink for 3 years and it tells.

I’m leading a project to merge two departments at work. I’ve actually called it Project Zeus. No really.

All PureGyms are PAYG. Looks like there are two in MK.

I use them all round the country when I’m away with work or whatever and I want to kill an hour. V easy to use the app and no induction bullshit. Most are open 24 hours I think.

Was just about to say the same thing

https://coldbrew.events/xc-mtb/chiller-24/

But Jaz proving he wasn’t a traitor isn’t proof that Harry was. She thought she was being made to choose between two faithfuls and she had to vote for someone.

I saw this earlier in the week – does this specific model deffo come with pre loaded maps like the Fenix 5x? I was struggling to find a definitive answer.

Completely legit. I left my van in the one next to the Adrossan ferry for a few days no issues, it was a lot cheaper than terminal parking.

As to @Scuttler’s point – as far aware from the entrance to both the store and the car park as you can get

It was a bit weird seeing one of my former business partners front and centre today. He’s actually a decent guy and Burges Salmon were only appointed in September so I have some sympathy. That said, being in big law is a 24/7 job some weeks that is what you sign up for. When it’s a big M&A deal or whatever it’s not even questioned that people have to work day and night to get the deal done,  but of course this is different because it’s not a process being driven by billionaires or huge multinationals.

I lasted 3 days before breaking my 2024 duck

Orbea Alma rigid – 7.7kg of ultimate fantasy bike. It’s all fun times until the credit card statement comes through.

There’s a very nice restaurant just west of GofF called Gather which has a range of boutiquey accommodation options:

https://www.lagganlife.co.uk/stay/

I had a mid range carbon one for a while. It annoyed me on day one because I had to completely redo the tape on the wheels – can’t remember what they were now  but the build generally was pretty meh for the money. Personally I thought it looked better than it rode. I ended up swapping it for a Scale and massively prefer the later.

Legislating to overturn a load of convictions en masse is probably the one way to sort out this horrific situation, and I certainly can’t think of any better solution. But it’s also going to set a worrying precedent from a constitutional perspective. After all, if parliament can legislate to say that somebody found guilty by a criminal court was in fact not guilty, then why can’t parliament legislate to find that someone found not guilty by a court was, in fact, guilty…?

When you combine that thought with the way that this government has systematically sought to criminalise the act of peaceful protest and has very publicly undermined the decisions of juries that have decided to acquit, there has to be a risk that all this could be misused in the future as a weapon to criminalise groups of people that the government wishes, for reasons of political expediency, to scapegoat. I guess that would never happen in the UK, right?

I would heartily recommend this, because it’s brilliant:

https://bikepacking.com/routes/woods-rat-run/

It’s an Orbea Alma, comes in at 7.7kg without pedals

They will be available if anyone wants to make an offer for them. They won’t be completely spotless as I rode them up and down the track outside my house this morning, and were set up tubeless with sealant at the shop.