discovery tour, day 5

[kirkcudbright]

May 5 - York to Worksop

Heading out of the hotel, I ended up as the default leader again. The cycle goes right through the center of York, but we were staying a bit out of town, and it was unclear where to pick it up where we were, so I said the hell with the prime directive from Minneapolis, we'll just ride the main road into town. And nothing bad happened.

York is a beautiful old town, continuously inhabited since the Roman period. In the Yorvik museum, they have a cut-away excavation where you can see the Roman wall, the Viking wall, the medieval wall, and the Georgian wall, all snugged up next to each other. Naturally, we didn't see that, or anything else in York. We didn't even stop for a picture of York Minster, let alone go in. This is so typical of this trip.

We kept getting lost today. And since the prime directive was that we should stick to the cycle route, and never deviate, we kept having to backtrack, rather than blundering forward, and catching the cycle route a little further on. We most of the afternoon lost in the countryside outside of Doncaster. The cycle route signs were entirely missing, and the maps only would have helped us if we had any idea where we were.

Towards the end of the afternoon, we got caught out in a severe electrical storm, and ducked under a bridge. Dan had gotten hit by lightning as a teenager, and finally asserted his authority as group leader - we were to get under the bridge, to hell with the bikes, and to hell with the two inches of mud we were standing in under the bridge. When we emerged, the mud was so thick on our shoes that we couldn't clip into the pedals.

As as result of the getting lost, and the storm, and the general slowness of the muddy bike paths, we sagged the last 20 miles or so of the route. On the bright side, this meant that we missed going through the industrial wasteland of Sheffield.

Today at the hotel, I had to spell "Selkirk" for the first time since I got here.

I was supposed to visit my cousin in Lincoln (about 25 miles from Worksop), but it was just too late by the time we got to the hotel. This is in keeping with my missing seeing two of my cousins on the cross-country bike trip last summer.

Medieval city gate into York.	Across the same road. About 2/3 of the medieval city walls are still standing.
Millenium Bridge in York. The weight of the bridge keeps the bow from falling down, and the bow keeps the bridge from falling down. Pretty gratuitously cool engineering.	Wire sculpture on a bridge on the cycle path.
Riding through an abandoned RAF base, past the nuke plant, at Selby, I think. There are a lot of nukes in the UK.	Yet another ingenious gate to annoy slow down bikers on the bike path. This is Mitch.