Today I biked from Harpenden to Cambridge and back. Other than being a bit windy, it was a beautiful day to be out. The route I followed is below. The side trip to the east was to visit RSPB Fowlmere.

I didn't do any research on places to go when I got there because my focus was on the biking, unfortunately. Cambridge was not so much a destination as a place to turn around. It was full of pedestrians. There was plenty of traffic too, but the city is pretty bike friendly. I only took 2 photos and a video, so I'm afraid you'll be disappointed if you came hoping for more.
This one comes pretty close to my mental image of the city, based on years of watching Masterpiece Theater.

This one is of the cat at the pub where I ate lunch.

Here's a video of Parker's Piece, near the city centre, and regarded by some as the birthplace of the rules of association football.

This memorial was on my route. The land is now in agriculture, but during WW2 it was RAF Steeple Morden and was used for a time by the USAAF. Looking at the land, it's very easy to picture it as an airfield. As a kid who grew up reading everything I could find about WW2 flying stories, I ate it up.

Video

Dirk Maas

2025-05-10 19:37:51

RAF Steeple Morden

Sportive: (noun) A cycling event in which a large number of riders travel a long distance on a marked route on public roads, and the time they take is recorded.

Saturday afternoon I put my bike in the back of a rental car (a Renault SUV with seating for 5) and drove to an AirBnB in Stoke D'Abernon, Surrey, England. The next morning I drove to the Village Hall in Cobham for the 2025 Spring Onion. (Heck if I know why they call it an "onion".) 300 riders had signed up. I didn't get there early enough to park at the Village Hall, but fortunately there was public parking nearby. The event was run by European Cycle Events, and they had set up an inflatable start/finish arch. The ride wasn't a race, but each rider was given a number and your time was recorded when you started and finished. I suspect that there were some who treated it as a race. There was a feed station about halfway through the ride, but the "racers" probably didn't stop there.

The first riders started at 8:30. They were released in bunches so that they didn't overload the roads. By the time I was ready to go, it was 8:45 and most of the riders had left.

It was a great day for a bike ride. There had been some threat of rain, but it didn't come until the ride was over. It was mostly sunny and cool -- in the low 50s. More info about the route:

The country we passed through was beautiful and mostly rural. I'm always grateful for the opportunity to see new parts of the UK. One noteworthy village we went through was Ellen's Green 😄. Cobham, the HQ of the ride, is only 4 miles from Claremont Fan Court School. If I'd had more time, I might have stopped by.

The feed station was roughly halfway and was full of bikers, but there was plenty of food, including bottled water, bananas, and some nutty bars. The rest of the food was pretty sweet. I didn't search too hard, but I did not find a bathroom at the feed station. I would have thought one would be provided. I was also disappointed that there were no bins provided for compostables (such as banana peels) and recyclables. Everything went into the same bin.

I did this ride as part of my training for Chase the Sun. CTS is a ride (not a race) from the east coast of the UK to the west coast on the longest day of the year -- the summer solstice, June 21. The goal is to make the trip between sunrise and sunset. You have almost 17 hours to ride 205 miles, so you need to average (according to my calculations) 12.2 mph. I'm happy to say that my average speed, measured during my workouts, has been inching up. On March 16, it was 12.1 during a 72-mile ride. On April 6, it was 13.1 for a 65-mile ride. More progress: for the Spring Onion, my average speed was 14.7. I'm grateful for the progress, but CTS will 3 times the distance of these rides.

As you can see from the elevation profile above, there were ups and downs the whole ride, but the toughest hill came near the end. A road sign said it was 18%, while Ride with GPS says it was 10.7%. I think it was maybe 14%. If you look at even an 18% slope on a graphic, it looks easy, but in reality, it's not. The hill was about half a mile long, and it was in the back of my head the whole ride. I didn't expect to make it without walking. But I've been working on hills and it paid off. I put the bike in the lowest gear, and slowly motored up the hill without stopping 😅

It was mostly downhill from there (literally, not figuratively). When I got to the finish, there were fewer cars in the parking lot (or "car park" as the Brits say). I went inside to get some food, and there was a table with Chase the Sun info on it. Manning the table was Phil, one of the CTS organizers. He recognized my name from the emails I'd sent to CTS with questions. We had a very nice conversation, covering training for the ride, how many riders complete the ride before sunset (about 60%), how many riders who fail come back to try again (a lot of them), my hopes for getting a CTS ride going in Michigan, what he does (film producer), and more.

The next sportive in the training calendar for CTS is the Hampshire Hilly Hundred. I've registered for it, so watch this space.

I still had to drive home, unfortunately in an unshowered state. I changed out of my clammy, wet top, put the bike in the car, and headed off. Long story short, I made it home, returned the car on time, and went to bed early 🛌. I'm so grateful that Ellen will join me for the Hampshire Hilly 100 and for CTS 😊

!cycling group

Today we rented a car and drove to Southampton to see their Christmas market. From there, we went to Portsmouth and spent the afternoon in their historic dockyard district. As a fan of Patrick O’Brian and his naval novels, I loved it. There was just too much to see and do for one afternoon. I believe another trip is required.

Here’s Ellen in front of part of Southampton’s medieval city wall.

They call them “Dutch pancakes,” but in Dutch they are “poffertjes” and I have wonderful memories of buying them from street vendors in Amsterdam while visiting my dad’s side of the family in the ‘70s. So of course we had to buy some. Hopefully we will get to Amsterdam and buy the real thing sometime soon.

HMS Warrior, at one time the biggest warship in the world. Launched in 1861 (I believe), it was probably one of the Royal Navy’s last wooden warships.

The Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s favorite warship. Sunk around 1545, raised in 1982. Thousands of items were found with the wreck, making it the largest source of Tudor items in existence. Things like tools, weapons, personal items, etc. It was preserved in the mud off the coast of Portsmouth. It is cool to look at a leather boot and picture it on the owner as he carried out his duties, probably thinking about his wife or sweetheart back home.

When the museums closed, we headed to dinner: fish & chips.

Here’s the tiny Fiat hybrid we rented. Turns out that the gas, £35, cost more than the car, £32!

The bike trip ended this morning when we were dropped off in Oban. I plan on posting a lot more photos and videos in the weeks to come. For now, here's a group photo, taken in a Tesco parking lot in Oban this morning:

We learned at dinner last night that Ed blogged about having breakfast in 48 states, at Breakfast Across America. He and Pat, his wife -- called the "Healthy One" in the blog, made 5 car trips around the US to hit the 48 contiguous states and have breakfast in each one. The blog is a lot of fun. Charles Kuralt, the CBS newsman of "On the Road" fame, made a list of 12 locations to visit in the US, one for each month of the year. Ed's new project is do so. I think he said that he only has one left -- Ely, Minnesota in July. I look forward to reading that blog!

After saying goodbye to everyone, Ellen and I went to Flit Self Drive to pick up our rental car, a tiny, 4-door Kia Picanto. After not driving a manual for 6 years or so, and never driving on the left side of the road, I'm doing it now. I'm grateful that the weather is great and that Ellen is navigating!

We did a little shopping (chocolates and clothes), got lunch at a fish & chips shop (their front window said that National Geographic rated them the 3rd-best chippy in the UK; I didn't know that Nat Geo was in the ratings business!), and then hit the road for Oban. Driving the narrow, twisty roads was an adventure. Ellen was able to appreciate the beautiful scenery a lot more than I was.

We're now in Aberfeldy, doing some laundry at an outdoor(!) laundromat. When the clothes are done, we'll check into our AirBnb nearby in Weem.

In the morning we'll finish the drive to Braemar, and watch the Highland Games!

Here's the outdoor laundromat:

We had to get to the route early in order to beat the crowd, so we had some time to kill after we got there and staked out our position along the barricades. The Moulin Rouge was only a few hundred feet away, so I got a photo of it.

This video (link) shows our location on the barricade. It was taken about 2 hours before the racers arrived. We learned after we got there, and as is obvious from the video, Place Pigalle is a red light district. The videos I took are PG-13, but, just so you know, if you show them to your kids, you might get some questions.

The route made a turn half a block from the Moulin Rouge. I took a video (link) of the crowd at the turn.

The House of Orange-Nassau is the reigning house of the Netherlands, so the people dressed in orange in the videos are Dutch. There was a group of them across the barricade from us. The racers representing the Netherlands are also in orange tops. Normally the racers don't acknowledge the fans, but it was nice to see the Dutch riders acknowledge the Dutch fans with a smile or a wave.

By the time they reached us, the racers had already been racing over 5 hours. The winner, Belgian rider Remco Evenepoel, crossed the finish line in 6 hours, 19 minutes, so his average speed was 43 kph, or 27 mph. Try doing that on your next bike ride!