30/12 Club Ride - David Shows His Tracking Skills

Anyone Seen David?

Arise Sir Wiggins

With everyone still on their Xmas holidays and with such good weather it wasn't surprising that we had such a great turnout today of ten riders. This included Andy foster on his first ever club ride. Chris P was leading us on another trek out to one of our favourite cafe stops, the 'lake Side' at Horam, but took us out  by yet another new devious route. We were all concerned at the state of the roads passing through Crowhurst as there were pot holes and broken surfaces everywhere, Jon S said maybe we should call this the Horam Cyclecross route as bikes and riders were getting such a hammering (Lord knows what they will be like once we get some frost!) Chris pushed out a faster than usual pace today and with myself and Steve D recovering from too much alcohol we spent much of the first part of the ride near the back of the bunch. Newbie, Andy F had no such trouble keeping up despite having done two hours yesterday on his turbo . As the ride went on our hangovers receded and it became a little easier for us, it was now David's turn to be the lantern rouge. At one point we completely lost sight of the others but Chris had waited at a junction for us. He asked if myself and Steve were the back markers, I told him that David was behind us and I thought (wrongly) that Dan had held back for him. Chris knew Dan was up ahead and so assumed that David was up there with him. It wasn't until we eventually caught up with the others that we realised we had left David behind and in the last 4 miles or so we had taken a number of turns. I didn't think there was anyway David would find us but perhaps he would make his own way to Horam? Much to my surprise David soon appeared , he had found us by tracking (grey owl style) our tyre marks on the road! Following our usual bacon sarnies at the cafe we headed south along Gun hill and towards Hailsham. Here there is that annoying bit where you have to cross the main dual carriage way (frogger style) , having safely crossed the road Jon S had a low speed slip on some muddy leaves, he didn't think anything of it but unfortunately about 3 miles up the road he realised his mobile was missing and must have slipped out of his pocket when he fell over, so had to abandon us and go back to get it. Once we got to Stonecross we had a fast return all the way home with the South Westerly wind behind us.
Thanks to Chris for mapping out another excellent route to Horam. Hopefully we will get some more good numbers on the club ride again.
Distance 50 miles
Ascent 835 m