Day 12
Mon 17th Aug

It was warm when I got up around 7am, and when we finally hit the trail around 10am it was already in to the thirties. Celsius that is.

 

 

 

It was pretty much all gravel until we stopped for lunch, but there was still the odd bit of pavement in between sections. For riders that haven’t ridden the TAT yet it might be disappointing to hear that it’s not completely off-road all the time, however when you’ve been riding on a long straight bit of deep gravel with your bike slithering around beneath you, that bit of paved road is rather welcomed.

The flat farm land and fields continued, as did the badly set up irrigation systems. Instead of a pleasant showering we had a flooded road to deal with this time, which we carefully navigated while thanking the trucks for keeping their wake down to a minimum. It wouldn’t take much of a wave to take down a 90, and despite sweating my tits off I wasn’t quite up for a dip in a muddy and goodness knows what else puddle.

It had been quite flat all morning, but after lunch the trail took us in to the hills.

 

 

It was paved road for the most part, but with beautiful countryside all around us I didn’t mind. The scenery took me by surprise if I’m honest, I didn’t expect it to be like it was, it was really lovely. Although I don’t know what I was expecting, as we tend not to research where we’re going so we still have an element of surprise.

 

 

And another thing we weren’t expecting was the rain. Neither Ed nor his bike like riding in it, and being rather on the torrential side we snuck in to an old barn and waited it out. It only lasted half an hour or so and it managed to take some of the heat away with it which was good, although the sun still beat down on us as soon as we stopped.

 

 

The rest of the afternoon saw us riding past rolling farmland and fields, with the odd bit of dirt and gravel through some woodland.

 

 

 

We were hoping to make it in to the National Forest that night to wild camp, but as the sun started to set and our light started running out we decided to find somewhere else.

 

 

 

We soon spotted an empty piece of land with some trees, and not really up for a rude awakening in the morning we decided to knock on the house next to it to see if we could camp there. It was then that we met the lovely Mary, who very kindly let us camp in her yard. She was 6th generation on the land, and as her hobby and passion of genealogy had led her to discover that her family was from England, I think she was quite excited to have a couple of Brits on her doorstep. She commented that not everyone around there was as friendly as her, and we thought ourselves lucky that we’d just happened to find one of the good eggs.