Saturday Morning Bike Ride

Vague notions of heading out to explore new roads are ditched in favour of a dawnder about familiar territory. The morning is dry but the light is rather murky, I'm on the road at about 8:20am.

These lovely trees are to be found lining the top of my favourite route out of the village. It's windy today, and unusually it's an east wind too. Many leaves are being briskly shaken from the trees, though as you can see a lot of green leaves yet remain.

Silhouette of jackdaw on telegraph pole.

Pastoral view over brambled wall and fence.

Ahh, the quality of this shot is not good but I include it as I enjoyed watching the four cygnets paddling along in a perfect line after their parents.

The road ahead. Such luscious greens, I do appreciate living in this part of the world.

I take the "private road, strictly no access" (they mean cars not bikes/pedestrians, I'm sure) to the collegiate church. A little pause for a bike shot but I don't go in to visit today, instead I carry on up the track to the woods.

Shells of snails.

In the woods. Most of the leaves seem to be going straight from green to brown before falling. No spectacular autumn colour displays this year, yet anyway.

Now down at the loch for this week's water view. The hawthorn trees have already been stripped of their leaves but are heavily laden with beautiful deep red berries.

I then follow the cycle path for a few miles. I like this sign, but I resist temptation and manage to stay on the straight and narrow.

Barr Castle, as seen from the cycle path.

Back on to the unclassified roads again and heading up towards more hilly ground. Look! I see a little group of cows, lets go and say hello...

How now brown cow.
At last, a patch of bright Autumn foliage.

The nice shed, looking even nicer than normal through the arching branches.

Shortly after this point there is an extremely steep little stretch of road. Just after puffing my way up it I meet my brother in law heading in the opposite direction on his bike. It's a small world!

Also at this point I'm about two thirds of the way through my ride, but as seems to be usual, I take most of my photos in the early stages of a trip and stop less frequently later on. There is a farm I'm about to pass which I would like to take photos of (whitewashed outbuilings with red doors and window frames, etc) but I always now cycle past it as fast as I possibly can before the snappy dog who lives there gets a chance to sink his teeth into my ankles which seems to be his goal in life. I see him today but he's in at the back of the farmyard so has too much distance to travel to reach me. The farm is at the top of a hill and by the time I reach it I'm not usually going very fast, one time he got much closer than I liked!

The tree mound. Pretty much downhill all the way home from here.

Pretty toadstools.

While out I pass a tractor trimming the hedges. Once home, I quickly nip out to "our" hedge to pick rosehips which I am now in the process of making into rosehip syrup. It's rather a palaver, we'll see how it turns out.

A little anecdote to finish: N likes to drink the water from my cycling water bottle (much better than water from one of his own beakers seemingly). He was doing so this afternoon from the bottle I'd taken with me on my bike ride. It's made of clear fairly see-through plastic. A asked why there was a spider in it. A spider in it? There was indeed a HUGE spider in it, Arrghhh! I'd filled it without looking in it this morning, you bet I'll be checking from now on. I still get the heebie jeebies just thinking about it.

I managed to get my bike computer working again. Distance cycled today: 21 miles.