Today’s ride took me up to new roads. Amazing really. I’ve lived in Preston all my life (rapidly approaching 40 years), and there’s still new places to explore. For this one I wanted to go between the gap that can be seen between the back of (from my point of view) Beacon Fell, and the front of Parlick.
Weather-wise, it was nice enough today. There was a risk of rain, but I chanced it with a gilet instead of a rain jacket. At times I found myself too hot, and at other times glad of the gilet. As I was stopping to enjoy the view on several occasions, I found I’d cooled quite a lot in just a short stop, so was very grateful of being able to zip back up as I set off again.
One thing that I wanted to do today, should I hear it, was to record the bird sounds I often hear out in the country side and figure out what they are. Well, I have an app for this (but of course). It’s a fantastic app called Bird Net. I’m not into birds by any formal standard, but I do like their songs. However these countryside birds don’t make songs, they make odd sounds. So I often wonder what kind of birds they are.
Anyway, I did come across such sounds today. And I stopped, hit record and waited. Of course, as soon as I hit record they stopped making sounds. But I wasn’t in a rush, so I patiently waited. After a while they did resume, and I captured what I suspected was a decent clip. After capture, you need to upload the clip to their Bird Net servers for analysis. At this point I realised, being in the arse end of nowhere, I had no internet signal… so after all that I am still none the wiser. Enjoy the fine picture of a field of sheep and no birds in sight.
It’s so nice out near the fells. I could quite easily picture myself living around there.
I do have some hesitation though. The fear of them building houses all over the fields. The lack of sewage works. The internet, which is provably terrible / non existent. Not sure I could cope with that last one.
Also the road surfaces are mainly garbage and if it rained heavily or snowed you’d almost certainly be trapped. But hey, them’s the prices you have to pay to live in picturesque beauty I suppose.
So the route I plotted today came in at ~33km and I will definitely be doing this one again. It would work fine in reverse also, though I suspect it’s steeper the opposite way around.
This leaves tomorrow morning for me to figure out what to do.
It looks like rain is on the horizon, so if that is the case it will be indoors. Will it be SST? It should be… but then I’ve put in 3 fairly high effort rides already this week. Something easier perhaps?
Well, if it’s nice enough to head out I’m going to do a flattish loop and try to get an hour and a half out there. That’d be grand.
