Today was to be Dane Hill. As we left Betchworth, I noticed that someone was of the back so I eased a bit. Meanwhile at the front they'd pushed on,we closed the gap to the next group with Andy,Jack and Paul. At the T junction for Leigh we weren't sure which way they'd gone, not sure why they hadn't stopped! Andy's Garmin showed right, so we headed right. Of course they'd gone left :) Andy reckoned that he must have a different route installed, so we pressed on. His garmin indicated a left at Stan's Hill, but everyone said it couldn't be. At Charlwood we turned back to Stan's Hill :) Here we picked up Andy's route.
There have been mutterings recently about the rides starting off too fast. And some of the regulars have stopped turning up. The othg rides started out as a casual steady mid week ride to get the miles in. A similar thing happened a couple of years ago and almost killed off the othg. So some rules were laid down at the time: we were to ride steady until the last 10km or so to the tea stop and similar on the return. Hills could be attacked hard, but we had to wait at the top.Lately this hasn't been happening. This enabled anyone not so fit to get a good ride and if they were up for it, a bonkers bit at the end :) Even Gary went out with the early ride today! :-O It may be time to reinstate the rules.
We rode steady/hard and got to Dane Hill about 20 mins after the others. The return route was tough via Ardingly reservoir. At Colgate I noticed that Paul was off the the back, so I dropped back to see if he was ok and then moved up to the front group only to notice that Andy wasn't there. He wasn't in sight at Rusper I stopped in case he'd had a mechanical, but he'd missed the traffic at the roundabout and couldn't get back on. He was taking a packet so we bit and bitted across to the others.
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