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Beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep Huh? beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep 6:30 in the
sodding morning, on a Sunday. What the hell's that noise? Oh yeah, it's my alarm. We're supposed to
be going to Nantmawr, aren't we? By 7:30 I'd managed to lever my fine friend/driver, Adam out of bed
and we were heading off on the mammoth drive to some place in England. Much to our surprise, we got
there vaguely on time, about 11:15 and wandered around the carpark staring at all the people with
long travel full sussers. There is some XC riding here, right? Eventually the rest of the party from
the South West shows up in the form of Andy Chequer and his roadie mate Rob.
At this point we're somewhat perplexed by what to do next, but suddenly I yell "There's a bloke on a
BASE", hoping that the person I'm pointing at actually is Shaun Rimmer. It is, resplendent in AMB
Headband, with Bomba hiding somewhere behind him, joined by two persons to whom I was introduced. I
think their names were Howard and Paul, but I may be wrong.
Still slightly disturbed by the number of people with more travel on their bikes than the AMB party
combined, we head off into a quarry. There's some jumps here. Bitter experience has shown that I
can't jump for toffee. A couple of party members run off to have a go, I wander around taking random
photos. We've really got no idea what's going on here. Bomba *thinks* he may have been here before
to watch a DH race, but he's not sure. We head off up a hill.
We reach the top and one of Rimmer's mates (Howard?) is pushing. Chain's come off. The first of
several mechanicals to dog him through the day. We chat idly about nothing in particular and notice
the only thing that appears to be nearby is a sign saying "Downhill start". There's a lot of people
around here with long travel bikes too. Seeing as only three of us bothered to bring anything with
rear suspension (not counting the good inch of travel afforded by the tyres on Shaun's BASE) then
this could be amusing. Is there another way down? No.
Down we go, this is my first taste of downhilling on my hardtail with 80mm forks. It's not about the
bike, they say. OK then. I'm actually not riding like as much of a muppet as normal, although I
still ride at the back so as to keep everybody else from seeing my inevitable spill. As luck would
have it I actually didn't come off, although I did somehow get lost on a DH course.
Back up the same hill again to see if we can find anything that's a little more our style. We stop
at some amusing bit of disused quarry working. This forms the shape of a mound with a gradual
approach at one end and a steep slope on the other side, which the local dewbies have obviously been
plummeting down. Being the perverse people we are, we try and ride up the bit that everyone else
goes down. We all fail. Shaun finds himself wondering why he bought a bike made from solid barstock.
After a couple of tries, most people are up the top by one method or another and we head off to find
something else. We find a bridleway. Again Shaun has to be bigger and better than everybody else by
getting an entire tree stuck in his spokes.
After a disappointingly short off-road run, the bridleway deposits us onto a public road. Fine. None
of us have a clue where we are, but we ride it anyway. We spy someone on a horse, slow down and stop
so as not to freak the horse out, the rider takes one look at the rabble in front, turns around and
goes back into the field she's just left.
After a series of swooping downhills on country lanes we end up with the realisation that we've got
some climbing to do now, back up to Nantmawr quarry. Slowly we all pile into the carpark, refuel and
wonder where the hell Howard's got to. He arrives pushing his bike again. Flat tyre this time. After
a brief refuelling stop, we head off to try and find this mythical XC course. We find something that
might work, but the number of people pushing extremely heavy bikes with yards of travel is worrying.
We've found the Slalom course. What the hell, we're at the top of the course now, we may as well go
down it. All the local kids are looking at this bunch of skinny tyred freaks wondering what the hell
we're doing, and why we're not wearing full face helmets. A quick ride to the bottom (during which I
managed to look very silly indeed) and we wonder what the point of all that walking up a hill is for
a very short run indeed. We head off in search of the elusive singletrack.
We find something and ride it. Someone's installed a ramp in it. This foxes a few of us and Rob ends
up landing on his head having tried jumping the ramp. Roadies and mountain bikes just don't mix
sometimes, it seems.
Heading back to the start of what we had concluded was not the XC course, much conversation went on
along the lines of "How big is 200 acres anyway?", eventually with us coming to the conclusion that
we'd seen pretty much all of it, and nearly none of it was singletrack. It's at this point that
people started murmuring the word pub.
That's my RR, anyway. Someone will probably post a BR (beer report) at some point and there's
probably a couple more RR's in the pipeline too, some of which might actually be accurate.
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Huw Pritchard Replace bounce with huw to reply by mail