A bike ride that went wrong…
Yesterday I decided that since the weather was so nice it’d be a good idea to go for a nice bike ride. One of the guys who works in the call center, Vlad, showed interest in a bike ride also having been a bit of a keen cyclist before some woman drove over him!
So, we met at Sun about 3pm with plenty of water and every tool under the sun that we could possible need. The plan was to cycle to Fleet, then around Fleet lake and perhaps pop into The Heron on the Lake for a quick pint before cycling back - no too bad at all.
Things were going excellently - we arrived at fleet and got about 1/2 way around the lake when Vlad pulled up and said - “your back tyre is looking a little low”. No problem we thought - we’ll just pump it up a bit and off we go. No such luck - the inner tube had rotated slightly in the tire resulting in the valve being at such a funny angle that no pump would attach to it. No matter what we tried we couldn’t move the inner tube around so in the end we figured we’d just have to let the whole tyre down, move the inner tube around, and then pump it up again.
We were soon pumping the tyre up again - but every time we stopped there was a loud hissing - puncture. Unfortunately the puncture turned out to be right on the valve - probably because the inner tube had pinched… No puncture repair kit was going to fix that and the only inner tube we had was too big for my tyre.
After some debating I decided the best thing to do was to leave my bike nice and hidden in the bushes. Walk home (about 1 1/2 hours), pick up the car and then drive back to pick up my bike. The only problem with this truly cunning plan was that Vlad and I weren’t entirely sure where we were… all we knew is we were approximately 1/2 way around the lake (though it later turned out to be 3/4 way around the lake - throwing our directions off slightly).
However, all was not lost. Vlad’s mobile had GPS on it and so we were able to walk roughly in the direction of home. At one point we slightly overshot our turning and the distance started increasing so I decided to take a shortcut through some woods rather than following the path. This seemed quite productive until we hit a locked gate next to a road… wondering why the gate onto the woods we’d just walked through was closed we climbed over and then saw the ‘DANGER! Army Training Grounds. DO NOT ENTER” signs in bright red coupled with the ‘Do NOT pickup suspicious objects” with a delightful picture of an explosion - oops.
Anyway… this is basically where the excitement ended. From here on we walked home, got the car, picked up the bike and then decided a BBQ was an excellent idea… the only think I’m regretting about the whole experience is that our chosen location for our attempted repairs on my bike was riddled with midgies - I now have rather red, bumpy and itchy legs 
I count approximately 16 bites on one leg and 44 on the other… time to go to the super market and pick up some cream for insect bites me thinks…
On a lighter note it turns out that Friday was Fraser’s (my house mate) birthday. He kept that very quiet - the only reason I found out was because I saw one of his cards…. As such we bought a cake which we all consumed after the BBQ last night.