Last Saturday, a solo ride, because Helen couldn't be prized out of bed. So instead of the planned spin round Peebles, a bit of quick replanning was required. My criteria weren't overly fussy - 50 - 60 miles, back roads, lots of hills and starting from home.
A little internet browsing later, I concluded that the Lammermuir Hills would fit the bill quite nicely, though in order to keep the distance down I would have to use main roads to get there. So (and I'm sorry if I get a bit geeky here) I set up a route on Bike Route Toaster, saved it as a tcx file, loaded it into Garmin Training Center and uploaded it to my Forerunner 305 GPS. Job done - now I just had to follow the little black line on my GPS screen!
The route to the Lammermuir Hills turned out to be quite busy, especially on the A68. Finally I got to the back-road section that I'd been waiting for, but it quickly turned into a (very steep) Land Rover track, and shortly after that the little black line proceeded through a gate into a field of sheep! Not having a map to re-route myself, I was forced to just cycle back the way I came.
Lesson learned: carry a map? No, actually, I'll just make sure that when I route myself over little white spindly roads on Google Maps in future, I'll call up satellite view to make sure they look like roads, not fields!
Thinking about performance - a bit slower average speed than last week's much longer ride. However, the route was considerably steeper, and contained a very rough section, and was ridden with no breaks, so I think I can be reasonably content with the time.
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