By some manner of miracle, I was not overly sore when I woke up on Easter Monday. I was pretty tired in spite of a good night's sleep, but that could not be helped: we had places to be, Flo and I. So I packed my things and we set off.
Wending my way through the residential streets of Yeovil, I learned a valuable lesson about navigating through a town or city on a bike. The most direct route as shown by googlemaps will certainly be the fastest if you're familiar with the terrain, but it's actually a massive faff when you're navigating it for the first time. I should have gone by main roads and sucked up the extra 0.2 of a mile; it would have been SO much faster than stopping every hundred yards to check my paper directions for my next turning, and then taking the wrong turning anyway, and then getting confused and having to whip out my phone and check googlemaps and double back... Well, I'll know better when I'm planning my route for the next trip! This is why I'm doing this after all, to iron out kinks like this before heading to America to do it for realsies. Kink the first: successfully flattened!
Once I achieved escape velocity from Yeovil, everything was much easier. Country roads, blue skies and sunshine were the order of the morning. In Castle Cary I broke out my Easter egg and cycled along one-handed, steadily munching chocolate with the other hand. The hill coming into Shepton Mallet was a killer, but then it was breaktime o' clock, and I spent a cheerful hour or more in Costa Coffee, catching up with a friend. The sun reached its zenith, and I slathered on sunscreen. It was a far cry from the cloudy drizzle of the Friday and Saturday.
If I thought the hill into Shepton was unpleasant, it was nothing compared to the hill on the way out again. It went on FOREVER. But then it was a beautiful ride across flat high ground, and after that, a gentle winding downhill to Chewton Mendip, with butterflies fluttering all around. I stopped shortly after at a lake by an ice cream van, and then I was on the home stretch. The view of Bristol as I approached from Felton was spectacular; I came round a corner halfway up a hill and suddenly the city buildings were glittering in the sunshine, nestled between the distant hills, with the deep blue reservoirs spread out all before. I've never seen Bristol from that angle before. It was beautiful.
Twenty minutes later I hit the sofa like a sack of potatoes and couldn't summon the energy to move again for another half hour.
SUCCESS >:D
