Mendips & Cheddar

While Nat & the girls are in Perth, I'm travelling around the UK. The first couple of days was working in Reading (while recovering from jetlag) followed by a night at Robin & Jo's place (a scenic 15km ride from Uni of Reading). Yesterday afternoon I came to Bristol to stay with Mark & Erica, and was informed by Mark we were doing a cycle tour for the afternoon.

The tour took us out over some big suspension bridge right next to town, and then through a whole series of country lanes, enveloped by hedgerows (see photo) into the Mendips, which is a folding series of ridges to the south of Bristol. A beautiful summer's day (almost hot at times) and not too many cars about, which made for perfect riding. Then, at the far end of the Mendips we made it to Cheddar Gorge, which was our main objective (and, disappointingly, was not actually made of cheese). The gorge was absolutely spectacular (see second photo for a snapshot) -- a long gentle downhill from the very top of the gorge, which gradually turned into a deep ravine with limestone cliffs on either side. We were spat out the bottom at Cheddar. By this time it was 5:30pm, we had been riding for 3 hours and were pretty tired and it was basically the turnaround point! So, we had a bit of a rest (a pint of bitter and some sandwiches at Axbridge) and then headed for home. Fortunately, Mark had planned an "escape route", which took us along a rail trail, avoiding all the hills, with the caveat that the last 5 miles would include quite a few busy roads. We hit the busy roads at 7:30pm on the dot -- just as the USA vs England World Cup match kicked off -- and the roads were completely empty! We were just about the only people in the country not at the pub. Made it home by about 8:30, and all pretty shattered.