The original plan was to head up to Hamsterley Forest today with Lee and Ed. Thankfully Ed checkout out the website a few days ago and figured that various bits of the trail were closed off. Upon diagnosis, it seems that quit a lot of the trail was closed so we decided upon a last minute diversion to Dalby Forest and my was it the RIGHT decision.

We arrived shortly after 9am and got out soon after – we chose to start in the Low Dalby car park and hence we would have the worst climb FIRST – another great decision 🙂 Just under 3 hours and around 30km later we got back to the car park exhausted but having given it our all. I think it fair to say that we had forgotten how much fun this place was – although Simon just recalls being the most tired EVER – but then the last time was almost 30degrees Celcius so that will have no doubt had a major part to plan in the exhaustion 🙂

Next time we will need to do the full 40km (all the red sections and the black) although clearly we will need to be super fit to do this 🙂

Simon got back, washed the bikes and sorted the CCTV so that all cameras are now ON and adjusted for optimum coverage :-). Just got to figure out how to control and configure stuff remotely if at all possible as then could hide the box away and not think about it again…