Make sure there aren’t any parts of the towbar that are close to the wiring for your parking sensors.

Otherwise, if your wife reverses into a tree, the tow bar gets pushed back very slightly, and slices through the cables. Which then costs around £500 to have fixed.

Or so I would imagine.

Lots of people do it all in a day. Well worth doing as it is a fantastic feeling to arrive in Eastbourne in the evening having set off from Winchester in the morning.

Perhaps awaiting the mobile-phone taps?

Singular Swift.

Thread Closed 🙂

Suckling Airways used to operate from Cambridge airport to Schiphol.

You’d drive over to the airport, and park around the back (for free, for as long as you wanted). Checkin time was fifteen minutes before departure, and you’d just show them your ticket and passport, and take a seat, and a cup of coffee from the percolator.

Then a door would open at the back of the room. Everyone would walk out through the door, and onto the airplane. Which would then just fly off.

Now renamed, and part of Stagecoach. No longer flies from Cambridge 🙁

I’ve just come back from quite a long ride with a friend. He rides a geared 26″ bike and is usually faster than me. Today’s ride was *very* muddy and slithery and I definitely had the edge over him on my SS 29er.

Lots of slithery bridleways. I imagine in dry twisty-turny forests it would be a different story.

Councils should show more responsibility with their traffic lights. So many traffic lights are just unnecessary, or setup stupidly.

Councils seem to prefer lights to roundabouts, even though the latter would work better in lots of cases.

I go past some lights on my way home that seem always to be on red when I get to them. I started out waiting patiently but so many other people jump them it seems pointless. Car drivers just seem used to it.

And then there are some other lights that think I’m a bus, so they switch to green for me, and stop all the cars! I always feel a weird mixture of glee and guilt going through that one.

So, reading some actual facts, it seems that all the UK needs to comply is for judges to decide as part of sentencing in each case, rather than a blanket ban.

Which would be fine by me (although the government doubtless won’t ask my opinion).

The prison population is so small, in the scheme of things, that with a vote or without one they have no influence democratically.

Prisoners wouldn’t be allowed to vote in margerine constituencies then?

If your mates don’t have SS you will hate it.

You’ll be forever standing around at the top of each hill waiting for them.

It devalues the electoral process. If someone wins an election by the slimmest of majorities, voters will wonder if the outcome would have been different without some sociopath being taught about their responsibilities.

I thought I roughly understood the opposing views on this. Until I read this in the Cambridge Evening News:

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Home/Playgroup-says-its-ban-on-British-is-not-racist.htm

A playgroup refused to admit two women on the grounds that they are British.

“Under the Equality Act 2010, if the club [was] set up especially for people from a particular ethnic or national group then discrimination on the basis of nationality or ethnic or national origin is not unlawful, but discrimination based on colour is prohibited.”

I really don’t understand what’s going on. Seems just arbitrary. Perhaps someone could unpack this for me.

Learn about all the available birthing options. Then carefully craft your birthing plan, discussing it with the group.

Then wait for the birthing plan to encounter reality and shatter into a thousand fragments. Demand an epidural RIGHT ****ING NOW.

12 hours of my life I’ll never get back.

huh? you pre riding the track Luke? the race is the following weekend, i’m there as well.

Hey, you’re right!

I’ve had it in my mind all this time that it was this weekend. I would have been very very puzzled….

I’d better go and lie down for a bit.

Luke – How about thrashing a bit further south and meeting everyone else for lunch?

Sounds like a plan.

Can’t do this weekend as I’m off to the Thetford Winter Series. But could do the weekend after that?

Whereabouts would work?

No hills? I think not 🙂

These noble hills are all within a few miles of my front door:

1. Bar Hill. Duh 🙂

2. Field of Dreams (bridleway up at Childerley). I can’t even get up that hill. Sometimes. After it’s been raining….

EDIT: sometimes I can’t even ride *down* this hill if it’s been raining enough.

3. Gunn Lane, just beyond the Cottenham road, where the hill rises majestically above the fens to a height of ten or more metres. From here you feel as though you are on top of the world, looking down upon Cambridgeshire.

4. Castle Hill. Again, duh 🙂

5. Cambourne Mountain. Ride out to Cambourne along the Harcamlow way. Down the not-totally-legal path to Cambourne, and up to the top of this soaring peak. Gaze out at the metropolis spread out below you. This one might not have been there when you lived around here, it’s quite new….

Need I go on?

*waves*.

I’m thrashing around Thetford a bit further north that day

Yep, Histon (just north of Cambridge).

Me and a few others go out Wednesday and Sunday mornings from 6:30am (we all have children and so have to squeeze cycling into the parts of the day when they are all tucked up in bed). Not very gnarly I’m afraid…

Email in profile if you fancy meeting up.

Sheldon – thanks again for taking us round the Forest of Dean. Had a great time.

I daren’t put up a picture of any people for fear of falling foul of the A&A rules, and pictures of bikes have been done. So just a picture of some leaf litter. I think I’m safe with that:

Harris. Worth it just for the ferry trip. Beaches fantastic. Hills, everything. Midges acceptable on the coast even in the height of Summer. Bring your bike.

Good grief.

I go away for a weekend’s cycling and come back to this nonsense!

WI freewheel can be taken to pieces and rebuilt very easily, so when it fills with mud you can fix it. And if it’s not being immersed in slurry it’s very reliable.

But, the downside is, as others have said, that changing the ratio at the rear is much harder. You either need two freewheels (expensive) or two sets of outer teeth (fairly expensive). Changing the outer teeth takes quite a while.

Spanner on removal tool. Then 5ft long steel tube over the end of the spanner. Then just push down on the tube with the wheel on the ground. Easy as.

Not everyone gets off though.

A woman who killed a time trialist in 2009 on the A1 claimed the same thing. “Sorry, I was distracted by a spider in my car”. They gave her 21 months.

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Cambridge/Grieving-dads-plea-on-cyclists.htm

Don’t worry – I’m on 33:18 which is about the same as 2:1 on a kid’s bike!

Would someone on a bike get to Edinburgh from London faster than an electric mini?

Signed.

I have some very cheap Miche dual caliper brakes which are excellent.

Are you sure you’re not using the wrong kind of levers (cantis vs calipers, road pull and all that confusing stuff) ?

Where do all these profits come from that allow banks to pay such huge bonuses?

What do the likes of RBS do that is so wildly profitable?

The only consolation is that they’re going to be paying 60% tax on it (plus NI and weird pension rules I didn’t bother trying to understand).

But I’d still quite like my employer to try to incentivise me a bit more with a couple of million or so. Just to see if it works or not, obviously.

If one dog leaves one dog poo then no-one will ever notice.

But if you have an area like Snowdonia, which is visited by several million people each year, then it’s a different story.

It’s a fragile upland environment, with rare plants, animals, and even fungae and bacteria. Upset that balance with a few million doggie dooes each year and now you’re looking at significant damage to the biodiversity that everyone goes to visit in the first place.

Same is also true of human faeces.

And that’s before you start worrying about what happens when it gets washed into streams that people and animals further down the mountainside might be drinking from.

Is it ok to leave it on a mountain side that is otherwise occupied by cows?

No. You’re altering the balance of the environment.

I mostly succeed in not thinking about what we as a society are putting into landfill – thanks ever so much for breaking the illusion.

Our great-grandchildren will be clearing up that particular mess, and wondering what on earth we thought we were doing.

EDIT: STW seems much faster now.

and keeping in mind that everyone’s opinion is a valid one.

Whatever! I reckon mine is valid about 30-40% of the time. It’s certainly not right now.

Broken in! Turns out the radiator grill is only clipped in. Just popped it out and could then fiddle around and open it.

Root cause of the problem is several different bits of indifferent design, starting with a plastic moulding that has snapped at a point where it takes a lot of stress and has very little material.

Could we have working lists of replies in profiles? Do STW even know that this is broken?

[And as for restoring the old posts – I’ve got a feeling that STW have just discovered why you always need to test your backup procedures by doing a restore….]

33:18. But I’ve gone as low as 33:21 for hilly areas (and still had to get off and walk).

Ok, thanks!

I’ll stick with my current 52″ of single geared goodness!

Odd, isn’t it.

EDIT: really annoying in fact. That and losing several years of posts.