September 06, 2003

Bank Holiday Weekend Biking In Wales

The pictures from our mountain-biking trip are now up on the website, and Malcolm's photos are online too. Be sure to check out the video of my failure to get across the stream without incident ;-)

We stayed at the Cringoed campsite just outside Llanbrynmair. Pretty decent site, with a ping-pong table and fresh eggs available.

On the Monday we headed over to Nant-Y-Arian to do the Continental trail. It's an excellent ride, a few really challenging sections of singletrack (at the end of the first Malcolm had a pretty impressive blowout, luckily Ian had a spare tyre!) and plenty of exciting descents (especially if you haven't got any front suspension :-)

Tuesday was supposed to be a bit less arduous, seeing as Ian was heading back that evening, so we chose something a bit shorter than the twenty miles we'd done the previous day and decided to do the Mach 2 ride from Machynlleth. Unfortunately, the signing for the trail wasn't as good as it could've been, so we ended up going wrong a number of times, which put about seven miles onto the ride, making it twenty-two miles by the time we got back into Machynlleth. I didn't think the route was as good as Nant-Y-Arian. A lot of the descents were on road, so they were fast, but over in no time and not very challenging, so it seemed like we spent all the time climbing long, steep, rough hills.

For the final day, Malcolm and I decided that as the bikes were under all the camping gear (and nothing to do with us being knackered after 40 miles up and down mountains) we'd go have a look at the Centre for Alternative Technology. The environmental message was a bit over the top in its bias at times, but there's a lot of interesting and useful information on all sorts of ways to reduce your impact on the environment. Lots of hands-on exhibits about wind, water, and solar power, composting and even natural building materials (stone is a non-renewable resource, so they try not to use it in their buildings). Interesting and thought-provoking stuff, and a nice end to a superb trip away.

Posted by Adrian at September 6, 2003 06:58 PM | TrackBack

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