A band of six hardy riders met for what was going to be (in my mind at least) a day of getting slightly lost, as I really didn’t know the area we were riding to and there was a very BIG road (in Blue on the map) to negotiate.
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So without further ado we headed off for Ozzy’s café in Little Chalfont. The route I chose is a very familiar one and as we were banging along the roads, I did think about a detour but I kept it linear just in case it went tits up after break. In fact we made great time down there and did it an hour and a half. This gave us plenty of time for tea and a great chat, where it turned out that one of our members (who shall remain nameless) is a secret WI groupie, and he (for it is a male) regaled us with a tale told at a WI lecture of the MOD site on Woodcock Hill near Sandridge and how the Germans had entered Britain in WW2 with radar equipment in small briefcases, which had been sabotaged by Allied sympathisers in Germany. This made for a great stop. But we had to push on and at this point one of our group decided to go home.
Now I headed out towards Chalfont St Giles and I have to say I surprised myself, I knew the way but as soon as we got there we encountered a roundabout not on the map, it was here that Richard came to the fore and revealed that he had done this ride recently, gosh was I relieved is all that I can say. He did an admirable job of guiding me to the destination. We went via Jordans and Seer Green and then we dropped into Beaconsfield, all these roads were very unfamiliar to me, I need to do more homework in this area. In Beaconsfield we met another roundabout that I knew we went straight over although the road sign clearly showed a dead end, but we went straight over and on to The White Horse in Hedgerley. This wasn’t far from the tea stop either.
So after lunch we decided that the last stop would be Blackwell’s in Chipperfield, via a lovely little road/track that followed the river Chess, but to get onto that there was a rather steep downhill to negotiate and Richard’s comment was ‘lovely path but I wouldn’t recommend it in the winter’.
After Blackwell’s I took the chaps home via Kings Langley, Tom’s lane and that road by the tin church into St Albans.
It was a really good day out, brought to you by team SAS (Surtees And Stubbs).
Neil 14/09/2014
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