Sunday bike ride 2
Another lovely day, so I set out to explore a bit more of Cambridgeshire. Again I stayed relatively close to home, but chose a route that followed two pathways that I had wanted to cycle along for a while. I was armed with the largest scale ordnance survey map (or should that be the smallest scale, not sure), and acquired some cycling leggings complete with gel padding. I must say cycle padding has advanced a lot since the last time I bought cycling shorts, some decades ago.
I started off by riding through the Addenbrooke's hospital campus to get onto the DNA cycleway to Shelford. It runs beside the railway line and from the carriages I had often seen people cycling to and fro alongside the central colour-coded strip. This is made up of stripes of four colours to represent the four nucleotides of the BRCA2 (breast cancer) susceptibility protein. (This is from the description on the internet). There are also double-helix sculptures at the end. It was a lovely ride through fields, and very weird to see the same landscape that I was very used to from the train at a different angle, like cycling through a picture.
From Shelford I headed towards the Trumpington park and ride, to pick up the cycleway along the guided bus route to Cambridge. This is a project that had been in the news a lot, first for the many delays and astonishing expense of constructing the guided (or the misguided) busway (as the locals call it). Secondly there have been a number of accidents, as summarised in Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridgeshire_Guided_Busway#Incidents. I hadn't in fact realised there had been so many, though I was aware of some. Anyway, this afternoon it was incident-free and bus free, and provided a delightful ride free from motor traffic, and wasn't unduly crowded by cyclists or pedestrians.
The ride was about 9 miles long, and took me about an hour and ten minutes, including stops to look at the map, so probably consistent with an average road speed of around 9-10 mph.
I started off by riding through the Addenbrooke's hospital campus to get onto the DNA cycleway to Shelford. It runs beside the railway line and from the carriages I had often seen people cycling to and fro alongside the central colour-coded strip. This is made up of stripes of four colours to represent the four nucleotides of the BRCA2 (breast cancer) susceptibility protein. (This is from the description on the internet). There are also double-helix sculptures at the end. It was a lovely ride through fields, and very weird to see the same landscape that I was very used to from the train at a different angle, like cycling through a picture.
From Shelford I headed towards the Trumpington park and ride, to pick up the cycleway along the guided bus route to Cambridge. This is a project that had been in the news a lot, first for the many delays and astonishing expense of constructing the guided (or the misguided) busway (as the locals call it). Secondly there have been a number of accidents, as summarised in Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridgeshire_Guided_Busway#Incidents. I hadn't in fact realised there had been so many, though I was aware of some. Anyway, this afternoon it was incident-free and bus free, and provided a delightful ride free from motor traffic, and wasn't unduly crowded by cyclists or pedestrians.
The ride was about 9 miles long, and took me about an hour and ten minutes, including stops to look at the map, so probably consistent with an average road speed of around 9-10 mph.