29/9 Rye Rotary

Oh Yay, Oh yay!

Dan H suggested riding the Rye Rotary charity ride today. A fair few of us were up for it.Once everyone had signed on were all launched on our way by the town crier.The first part of the route was the Rye Lydd road. This road seemed to go on for ever and there was a moderate headwind in our faces all the time. I rode alongside Marcus and we were able to steadily overtake most of the group, catching up with Alexander at Lydd. It was a releif to change direction here because that gave us some respite from the wind. Now the route headed out over some of my favourite lanes over towards Mary in the Marsh and Burmash. Having fluffed a road junction I found my self out of the slip stream of the others but ended up riding alongside a nice young chap called Kyle who as it turned out had recently made conatct with HSCC. Kyle had never done a ride over 25 miles before so this was going to be a new learning experience for him . I gradually dropped kyle and rode on my own for the next 5 miles a so. The next road sign for the route said go left but after three miles,I came to a road junction with no more signs to follow. Unsure what to do I waited for some other  riders to turn up. Before long kyle and Mark B were there but they too were confused about which way to go. In the distance we could see a block of riders approaching us, this turned out to be John V and Nick S with a couple of friends. Putting our thoughts together we decided we would just have to ride back to the last course marker we followed. This caused some a few choice words (LOL) from one of John's friends who was struggling a bit but I just resigned my self to it. Arriving at the sign we met Alexander and half a dozen riders.They had just come from the only proper refreshment stop . Looks like the wind had blown the sign round and we had gone left instead of right to where some nice hot coffee could have been ours (drat). We decided to join this group rather than continue to the official rest stop, we didn't fell guilty about missing part of the route as what we had just done in error was further than we would have travelled anyway. From here the wind was at our backs and rather than struggling along at 15mph it was comfortable riding at 21 mph. Our enlarged group slowly started to fragment with Nick, John and myself teaming up with some Rye rovers and leaving Alexander and the others behind but after a  short refreshment stop we were all back together. The nice people serving us drinks told us they had had riders complaining about the signage and reluctantly we had to agree that some signs were pointing  the wrong way and also there were not enough of them. Despite tiredness slowly creeping in, I managed to pull away from Alexander and rode ahead with John and Nick.A diversion took us along a wonderful newly resurfaced piece of road along a dyke near Brookland, John said he could imagine he was riding in France on this section. As we neared Appledore John and Nick slowly pulled away from me but graciously waited for me to catch up at Appledore. After a little loop around the village, all that was left was the tail wind blast all the way down the Royal Military canal path back to rye. Nick was feeling good and really put the hammer down, this burst of speed dropped even John. There was no way I could manage that pace and setted down into a steady 20 mph along this rather feature less road. Hearing another bike behind me I turned round to see Alexander. He had a put in a big effort to catch me up and at this point was probably stronger than I was. It was a great feeling as we rode together into rye to sign back in and avail ourselves of the tea and cakes there. Waiting for us was lee who had gotten round much faster than we did having ridden in a group with the legendary Barry G from Rye Wheelers. This was a great day with almost perfect weather. Although the signage could have been better and there was quite a lot of backtracking on the route, we all really enjoyed it and will be back next year. Taking the gps data of my Garmin,I have used about half of this route to create a new club/early bird 60 mile ride, we will have to try it out on a non windy winters ride?