I hope it does drop to something more sensible! Really doesn’t seem like value for money at the moment.

Aye, the clegs are vicious this year. Out on site yesterday and can’t remember ever seeing them that bad. Even been attacked in the garden! On the plus side the heatwave seems to have decimated the midge population.

Caerlaverock is great for kids – properly cool castle. The red kite feeding station is worth checking out too, can be pretty impressive.

A trip to Drumlanrig would be good – kids can go play on the adventure playground which is awesome (I don’t get why I can’t go play on it anymore…) and you can go see Rik and hire a bike.

Alternatively you could do the P-ram trail through the Galloway Hills and go see some very dead larch trees. I think it’s got untapped tourist potential!

Mudguards make the world of difference to a winter commute.

Most definitely! Plus I found dedicated winter shoes made a big difference to comfort too. Gore tex, fleece lined life savers!

This thread reminds me I was going to get some massively warm gloves for my commute over the coming winter…

Anyone can race and the best bit of it is even if the whippets disappear off up the trail in a blast of smoke you’ll quickly find yourself with others of a similar ability. Then you get to duke it out with them over a few laps which is incredibly good fun and really quite addictive!

Plus it’s a really good excuse for new bike bits…

I run 40-28 with a 9spd 11-32 cassette. Which works just fine though I think I might go for a 11-34 cassette when it’s time for a new one. I doubt I’ll spend the extra to go 10spd, far more interested in going 1×11. That really interests me.

I have Campy veloce on the winter bike and shimano ultegra on the race bike. I prefer the aesthetics of campy and the shape of the hoods, probably the shifting too. Actually, come to think of it I prefer the campy all round. The winter bike even has campy wheels which have been awesome. Yeah, definitely a fan. 🙂

A full on dungeons and dragons fantasy role play battle. Lots of people dressed as elves and wizards and what not, hitting each other with cardboard swords.

The only time someone dressed head to toe in lycra has been able to point and laugh at what others are wearing!

Still cheaper to have them free isn’t it?

No, it really isn’t, child tickets are peanuts. You save way more off the adult ticket than you have to shell out for the child.

You can get even cheaper tickets if you get a family and friends railcard – then you have to pay for the kids but you get a third off or thereabouts so not only do you all get seats but the journey costs less too. You are allowed to use it if the kids are still valid for free travel, we use one with our 3 yr old.

Surely we need Shirley too…

can ewe pm me the name of your daughter please and I’ll put it on Master Gwaelod’s “List of Psycho Chicks to Avoid” when he’s 18 yrs older

Can you PM me Master Gwaelod’s potential earnings and future prospects and I’ll see if he fits the criteria to be added to the list of potential suitors for Little Miss Beard? 😉

hahaha! We had the exact same, it was very hard not to laugh as an indignant wee ball of fury sat there trying to force one out. Now she’s 3 and potty trained she still occasionally refuses to go to bed and insists she needs a poo. Then proceeds to sit on the throne chatting away quite happily.

Her wee brother has started protesting if we get in the car. The moment you back out the drive he starts grunting away as he works on a masterpiece.

Should see the rat traps we have here, bloody scary things, I hate setting them as at any moment I think they’re going to go off. And take my hand with them. They’re humane traps as anything that gets caught in them is dead. Very dead very quickly. We’ve tried poison, baited traps and plain old jaws of death metal ones. Most effective?

The dogs…

They had it on a display stand at the Scottish bike show in Glasgow a few months ago. I thought it was rather over engineered to be honest, the seat post clamp being my favourite bit of excess. Weight was ok. All in all nothing to write home about, there are way more exciting 29er HT’s out there.

Not quite an audiobook but the Mighty Boosh radio series is absolute genius as is the League of Gentlemen. Might not be too good an idea listening to stuff that funny whilst driving though!

Really annoyed I’m not going this year. It’s absolutely brilliant, be there next year for sure! The LMP cars look amazing and watching the night laps is absolutely stunning. Oh yes I might be a bit of a fan! Kicks F1’s arse…

I had a set of XTR ones I used for a while a few years ago. The shifting was excellent, the braking woeful! Can’t say I’ve missed them.

Our first turned up the day I put the cot together. I like to think it was well planned but it was more like blind luck. I can’t remember when we had everything ready, but it wasn’t until quite late on. We were considerably more laid back for number 2! Made us realise just how much of the stuff we had for number 1 wasn’t actually required.

The only thing I was concerned with having ready was the hospital bag. Make sure you have a couple of good books stashed in there and the camera has a full battery and room on the memory card!

I used to use Ergon GX2 (with carbon bar ends) all the time but I’ve since switched to a wider riser bar and have to say I haven’t missed the bar ends. I may yet try a wide flat bar and see if I like bar ends on that but for now I’m happy without. So much so I’m selling the ergon’s if you’re interested 😉

I’ve just checked mine, I can move the lens up and down a wee bit, but not much. The lock gets tighter when I put them on (if that makes sense) then the lens doesn’t move at all.

I can smell the bs from here. What a load of crap.

Ditto. I had a similar problem once when I sold a set of brakes on fleabay. The buyer made all sorts of accusations yet couldn’t prove a single one. I checked his history and he had previous of doing this sort of thing. In the end I just ignored him. He didn’t start a dispute or anything (funny, I would have if things were as bad as he claimed) he just left negative feedback, which has now gone from my profile. It was a pain, I rarely sell on fleabay now.

The best event of last summer by far!

I find NN to be very pressure sensitive, hit the sweet spot and they roll pretty well. I do find they’re a bit floaty, but they do eventually hook up.

I got the Yoga for Athletes book a while back which is pretty good though fairly in depth and there is some hippy stuff to wade through. It’s embarrassing realising just how inflexible you get through cycling…

Some folk on Facebook complaining it’s been cancelled even though they hadn’t actually entered yet. I guess that’s the organisers conundrum.

It’s just gone June, normally that would mean plenty of time left yet to enter for an event in September.

Really? Bugger, where did you hear this?

When I was a city slicker I used to use a courier bag, really loved them until I had to lug around more and more kit (like laptops and books) so I started to use a large rucksack. Ended up getting an Ergon BC3 bag and I’ve been blown away by how good it is. Barely notice it’s on, really stable and plenty of room. Not cheap (I got mine in a sale) but the best bag I’ve used on a bike. I currently use it for a hilly rural commute and it’s been brilliant. Also a great bag for bivvy trips!

Is that Spitfire painted PRU blue?

I find them both quite different. Road is more steady state power whereas XC is hard sprint followed by hard sprint. So maybe crit racing and XC compliment each other better than open road racing and XC. Pedalling techniques are quite different in both but if anything I think XC benefits road riding more than the other way round.

I’ve been wanting to switch to tubeless road tyres for a while now, haven’t quite worn out my current set of GP4000s yet though. Really intrigued by the Ultremo’s. I need tough race tyres and think they might just be the ticket!

Defeet armskins are my favourite.

http://www.defeet.com/60209/Arm-Coverings.html

Knee warmers are great also.

As above really, wear mine from dawn to dusk, even good for night riding. not the best when it gets really hot and sunny, but then I live in Scotland and that is very unlikely to happen…

Conti GP4000s black chilli, awesome tyres. Wear well too.

The MTB race world has a ready made audience, it’s gagging for people to organise plenty of proper racing.

Perhaps my point is that there are scant few organisers in the UK organising ‘proper’ XC races.

This is the problem in my opinion. I’m going to get all misty eyed now and hark back to the good ol’ days, but when I were a lad growing up round here there were loads of local XC races, you could race near enough every weekend, the air was cleaner and I’m sure the grass greener too… But somehow that’s all gone. There’s a lot of road racing, but if I want to ‘properly’ race XC I have to travel all over the country to big events. The grass roots XC scene has all but died it seems. It’s hardly covered in any of the mags (maybe MBUK still does but I never buy it anymore) and XCracer is predominantly southern based so pretty useless if you’re based up north.

Maybe Singletrack could help folk in various parts of the country organise and promote some local XC racing? Get back to grass roots!

At dinner one evening –

Me: ‘Eat your carrots.’
Daughter: ‘No.’
Me: ‘They’ll help you see in the dark.’
Daughter looks at carrot suspiciously, but eats one. Then stares hard out the window. ‘It’s not working.’

Now can you fix the issue where the “Vegetarian Option” is more imaginative than Goat’s cheese something or other..
Just knowing what it is would be nice half the time. (And one dish is not a bloody “option”.)

Weddings are the worst for this. Most of the time it’s just the meat dish with the meat taken off… Or mushroom risotto.

I’ve always found France to be either brilliant or laughably poor at catering for us vegetarians. Once in SW France we told the restaurant owner we were veggie and he disappeared off to the kitchen and came back with an excellent meal he’d devised on the spot using fresh local produce. Another restaurant owner told me I was ‘fussy, like a child’ and refused to serve me!

As for affecting me riding my bike, it hasn’t at all. In fact I’m more leaning towards a vegan/whole foods diet these days and I’m trying to limit cheese and other dairy products. I don’t touch fake meat such as quorn or any of the ready meals you can get either.

I just switched from 3×9 (44/32/22) to 2×9 (40/28). I’ve been out a few times and I’ve noticed that I’m shifting between the 40 and 28 a lot more than I used to shift between the 44 and 32 on the old triple. Certainly don’t miss the granny ring, but then I hardly ever used it anyway. I’ve got a 9 speed 11-32 cassette on the back, which I may end up regretting!

The only issue I have is that the chain length when set as per SRAM’s instructions does seem to extend the mech a fair bit when in 40F 32R, so I’ve been avoiding using the lower gears when in the 40 and dropping to the 28 but keeping it mid cassette, this is probably a good thing though.

I did need a new front mech too as I have an e-type mech and the triple specific mech was the wrong shape for the double chainset, it sat way too high off the chain rings and wasn’t working that well.

I caught myself laughing at the comments about Ryker and realised I know way too much about Star Trek to point and laugh at trekkies… Though this film takes it to a whole new level:

Worth a watch if you haven’t seen it.

BSG (remake) is the finest sci-fi made for TV IMO.