Mountain biking- Afan Forest, South Wales

Having arrived at about 11:30 Friday night in the rain!! We managed to get the tents up and had a rough nights sleep, there was still hope for a good days riding as the sun dried most of the rain fairly quickly on Saturday morning!!

The guys below after a 40km ride and having climbed 2000metres on the ride!! It wasn't a bad days riding no-one fell off, but the bikes suffered a little!! 2 punctures one each from Pete and Liam, a snapped chain from James, and a broken pedal and crank from Luke!! The route we did was called the skyline.

When camping its important to stay clean!! And we tried our best!!

And of course the weekend wouldn't be complete without a car breaking down on the way back. This is Luke's car being towed by Pete all the way from the Severn bridge back to Oxford!! At its best I think we had a 15 car tail back!!

Below is a loop from the highest point on the ride. According to the spec of the ride, the hills in the distance are the Brecon Beacons and the black mountains.

In the photo below if you look really closely inbetween the trees you can just about see the wind farm, which we were right next to near the start of the ride!! (I promise you its there!!)

To see some more pics of the weekend, check out pete's site, (the ceaser salad tasted as good as it looks!!) click here.

East London walk

This walk started outside city hall and finished off near the gerkin.



east london walk on Vimeo

the meeting point

The walk started the other side of city hall, but this is a new park that is under construction. Its part of More London.

This is the meeting point, its called The Scoop and is like a small amphitheatre.

more london

shad thames

Shad Thames is an old part of London that has a lot of derelict warehouses which were used for storage. They have now been converted to flats and new buildings have been built to look like the originals that are there.


The bridges you can see where used by workers so they could get from each warehouse easily. You can see on the left side of this photo the old building and on the right the redeveloping of an existing building.

Below is a shared garden for the people that live in the converted warehouses.

towards tower bridge

on the way to tower bridge there was a cafe with some colourful chairs out the front.

lunch

Having just crossed tower bridge we were trying to find somewhere to have lunch, on the way to find somewhere affordable there was a wall of paintings, which were quite fun to look at.




We eventually found a small cafe, where you can buy a pint of orange juice. as it was a bit windy that day we put all the napkins in the jar with a guard on top.

towards the gherkin

On the way to the gherkin, there was this building which looked like something from Lord of the Rings.


I like this picture because it makes the gherkin look like it penetrates the ground rather then just sitting on the ground.

spitalfields and brick lane

Spitalfeilds market was empty when we got there

On the way to brick lane there were some degree shows, which weren't as good as I thought they were going to be.

on the way home

On the way to the train station we went over a roundabout which was raised and had seats in the middle. The loop below shows the panoramic all the way round the roundabout.



After a visit to the pub we finally made it to the train station to get home.