Archive for the ‘Hayling’ tag
Downs Link Ride
Just back from a 3 day bike trip focusing on riding the Downs Link – a route along a disused railway that connects the North Downs (Guildford) with the South Downs (Brighton). We made it a 3 day ride by adding in some of the Thames and Wey towpaths and some of the south coast cycle route.
Lets start with the trip video:
Queen Elizabeth Country Park, South Downs Way and Hayling Billy Trail
This was really 4 very different rides all in one! It consisted of:
1. The advanced mountain biking course at Queen Elizabeth Country Park
2. From there following the Southdowns Way to the A29, just west of Amberly.
3. On the road to Burnham (from where I took a train to Havant)
4. The Hayling Billy Trail back to south Hayling Island.
Total: 39 miles – most of it offroad, and a great 6 hours training. Here is the route (terrain view gives you more of an idea):
View larger version at EveryTrail
I also used the trip to try out my new Tachyon XC Micro helmet camera for the first time. The following is my first dabbling in the world of helmet mounted video (much better efforts hopefully to come in future posts). The video is all of the advanced mountain biking course at Queen Elizabeth Country park – so gives a flavour of the riding there:
In a side note – I learned with interest recently that if you upload something to YouTube that incorporates copyright material (such as say… the music you put your biking video to) it is quite possible that it can be actively permitted to remain there by the copyright owner for various reasons… see this fascinating talk on how YouTube manages copyright material.
Hayling Island to Petersfield bike ride and first try of EveryTrail
I’ve just completed my first training ride in preparation for my Atlas trip. With the help of my iPhone I found a rather nice route from Hayling Island to Petersfield and back. You can’t easily avoid the busy main road off Hayling or the centre of Havant but once I’d escaped Havant it was a lovely ride – undulating but with only one really tough climb – crossing the South Downs near South Harting on the way back.
I used the ride to try out a couple of route mapping apps on my iPhone. First up Trails Lite – this was working fine – but the free version stops after 5 minutes. So on to Everytrail for the rest of the route. It worked really well – I used it both to map my route and also to frequently stop and plan my next step as I was making it up as I went along. It’s easy to use – with all the features I needed easy to find.
The only major issue was with battery life (not the fault of EveryTrail!) – my phone died 2/3 of the way through – I’d expected this issue with iPhone trip mapping – as it stands it’ll be great for mapping training rides, but isn’t going to be up to anything longer. There are possible solutions to this (there are external extra battery devices, or upgrade to iPhone 4!) but that’s for another day.
Anyway – the EveryTrail route is below. I edited it on the web after to add the missing data. As you can see I totaled 42 miles – a good start to my training…
Hayling Island to Petersfield loop
Note that you can click on the red dots to see photos I took at those points. Or go to the EveryTrail site to see a larger/interactive version.
Bike ride to Portsmouth
Today Liz, Dylan and I set off on a bike trip that was rather flatter than my usual. One that took in most of Hayling Island’s south beach and most of Southsea beach as well. Family bike rides may be lacking in the speed and exhilaration of fast road riding or sweeping singletrack but that doesn’t mean they have to be dull.
This ride had day long sea views, countless opportunities for ice cream and snack breaks, a brief spell of riding along a 15th century fortification, us crossing the path of the worlds longest running commercial hovercraft and even some clambering around a kiddies pirate ship. But the highlight for me was taking the bikes on the Hayling Ferry over to Eastney. There is something great about combining these two modes of transport – in this case not least because the total time to Southsea was less than it would have been to drive, but also – well it just looks cool having your bike on a ferry!
Next time – perhaps we’ll go a stage further and take the next ferry over to Gosport as well!
