Tuesday 7th 41-47F, 5-8C, heavy overcast with a cold S-westerly wind. Did my usual circular walk. I saw a robin at the entrance to the woods. Stop laughing at the back! Robin's are timid and a very rare sight in Denmark. In the UK we always had tame robins in our garden. They would fly down and take food from the hand or sit on the handle of the garden implements while we worked nearby. Over here I doubt I see a Robin more than once in five years.
Some
eco-terrorists must have been at work locally. Several daffodills were
bravely growing on the grassy verges. Perhaps they were planted in
protest at discarded McLardy's packaging and beer cans? Twenty years ago
you never saw any litter in Denmark. Then the breweries/sugar bombers pushed for
disposable cans instead of the default returnable/recyclable glass
bottles and the rot set in from there. [Quite literally!] Nowadays you'd need a large sack
to clear half a mile of grass verge! I find it interesting that crappy,
fat-and-sugar loaded takeway food, fag-ends and empty packets, booze and
sugar-laced crappy drinks are the most likely packaging to be seen
gracing the verges. The same "household" names crop up regularly. Most of
it life-threatening to the idiot consumer. If nobody picks up the rubbish then it joins the [recycling station commuter] trailer fall-out to be shredded by the council's mowers. It stayed grey, cold and quite windy for my ride. Though I managed to avoid a headwind until the last leg. I looped down to the coast via some very hilly lanes. By retracing the same route I was able to enjoy descending the same hills which I had previously climbed. I still haven't found a hill I can't climb reasonably comfortably in bottom gear [28"] but still wish for another lower gear. A couple of inches lower would allow me to keep my cadence a little higher with less effort. It is never about just being able to climb a particular hill in a particular gear. It's all about maintaining an optimum pedal rpm to avoid damaging knee pain. Climbing a hill is really no different from pushing too high a gear on the flat or into a headwind. If you run out of low gears, such that your cadence drops too low, then you become a pusher rather than an effortless twiddler. 25 miles.
Wednesday 8th 43-55F, 6.C, an overcast start has burnt off to bright sunshine with a light breeze. My poor 7-year old computer's hard drive was within a couple of GB of overflowing. So I ensured my pictures were all on the external hard drive and unplugged it. Then I deleted 148GB or 32,000 images from the C-drive. Probably a mistake because the external hard drive has been syncing since I turned it back on. It is endlessly loading MP4 files which I presume are old action camera videos. Now it has started work on the images. I just hope it doesn't refill the C-drive to the brim! The C-drive is showing GBs less free capacity with every passing minute. Eek! I left it running while I went for my walk and thankfully it stopped with 60GB free space left.
I'm having to share the roads with giant, leaky, pigshit spreaders again as I jump onto the verge to leave as much distance as possible. They were leaving long, wet, stinky tracks on their way to the fields. I caught a glimpse of the Robin in my binoculars but it rapidly disappeared into the undergrowth. Still a cold wind despite reaching 52F at 10.30am. I am struggling to match my clothing to the rapidly rising temperatures again. I leave early at just above freezing and it has often risen 20 degrees F by the time I return.
Mmmm! McLardy's coffee! Burp! ©
I left mid afternoon to find a puncture-proof wheelbarrow wheel. I noticed I had a semi-flat rear tyre but pumped it up hard to 100psi with the track pump and thankfully it stayed up. A tiny square of flint was sticking out of the tread of the Durano. Having dodged the pigshit spreaders again there were no barrow wheels at the first DIY superstore/builders merchant. So I had to cover some hilly ground before the next one shut at 5pm! [They open at 6am] Made it by seconds after several shopping stops on the way. Success! They had one left in stock. Remind me not to ride at the same time as the
Thursday 9th 41-52F, 5-11C, light winds, variable cloud. A long walk through the woods. Saw a superb Greater spotted woodpecker in its best and brightest clothing. Later, a straight there and back shopping trip for 15 miles.
Click on any image for an enlargement.
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