All week (including early this morning), the BBC were forecasting rain for much of Saturday here, but as they also forecast rain for ALL of Sunday, I felt that today was the better opportunity to get my April 100km done, and despite temperatures having finally risen to the point where shorts and short sleeve tops would normally make their annual debut, I thought that I'd still be better off dressed for the inevitable wet weather.
That lasted all of six miles - I was sweating like a pig! Removed my jacket, hat under helmet, long fingered gloves (didn't have my fingerless on me, so rest of the ride was bare handed), but left the leggings and second top as they'd have been too difficult to remove. Also it didn't help that I quickly ran out of space to store all this extra kit - the zips on my bar bag had got stuck (probably months of winter grime had jammed them up), meaning I had one less place to stuff things. At my second stop I eventually pried them open and had another reshuffle.
Once I'd got back to normal temperature, the ride was quite decent. Did a number of short, punchy climbs to the north of the Chilterns around the Whipsnade and Dunstable area and grabbed a few new VeloViewer tiles around the south of Luton. Still very wary about descending and had the brakes pretty much on full as I came down Bison Hill from Whipsnade Zoo for the first time. But even after riding for four and a half hours, there still wasn't a drop of rain - go figure!
