Whitley Bay

Our local council has tried to do the right thing for cyclists. They spent some money & put in quite a lot of effort to uncover & re-surface the old railway lines (”Waggonways”) that crisscross the area. These make for excellent cycling surfaces, being as they’re all pretty flat. BUT The council also fell into the...
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Omigosh! A real bicycle race . . . coming right past our front door! An ideal way to spend half an hour - waiting in the drizzle to see over a hundred bikes come whizzing past in a little over two minutes. Actually, it was great fun - mugs of tea & a chance to...
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I’m ashamed to admit that I drove into Whitley Bay today on an errand. That’s about 0.8 miles each way. Sorry. My excuse was that it was absolutely p!$hing down, and I’d just had enough of getting soaked - soaked last night on the Tandem, soaked this morning when I ran to the shop to...
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No, that’s not a misquote from some French royalty. It’s the motto of 617 Squadron, whose story was told by Paul Brickhill in The Dam Busters - one of my Thrilling Yarns that I read over the summer. It was Daughter’s first swimming lesson after the summer break. And although the weather forecast was for...
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Cycling in to my client’s office this morning, I had two near misses - both situations that I could have almost certainly avoided by riding more assertively, and holding my line. In the first, I was approaching roundabout, where the lane nearest the kerb splits into two - the left (3 in the picture) is...
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My swimming buddy Simon, couldn’t make it last night, so I decided to go for a ride instead. It was one of those ups & downs rides, with the highs provided by favourable wind on the way home, and the lows from eejits in a car. Let’s deal with the lows first. About six miles...
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Shana and I went for an easy run this morning - down to Tynemouth and back. I’d wanted to go out along the North pier of the Tyne, but the gate wasn’t yet open, so we just cut the run short a little. The first stretch of the return journey is to run up the...
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I’d very nearly got out of the habit of blogging. And that can’t be a good thing. But at last, I’ve caught up, so from now on, I’ll be posting it as it happens. Or fairly shortly afterwards, anyway. So this morning was a run with Shana - we went down towards North Shields, and...
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Yesterday the weather was forecast to be mostly good, and I had a meeting scheduled with a client that my SatNav said was only 36 miles away by bike. Hmmm . . . with fuel prices now at £1.30 a litre (that’s $9.60 for a US gallon) (So all you in the USA...
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I felt stressed out at work this afternoon, and then noticed that it was almost high tide, and the moon’s pretty full, so it was going to be a high tide. So I went for a swim in the sea. What I didn’t notice was that there was quite a swell, so my swim...
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