We met at the usual start point and after having a brief chat with a young Harley Davidson owner we left the town via Bedmond, where we bumped into Peter S on his way to meet West Herts CTC at Smallford, and down to Kings Langley. Unusually for us, we stayed on the road past the old Ovaltine factory, which still looks a tremendous Art Deco building even though it has been converted into apartments. Ovaltine (a powdered drink added to milk, for those not old enough to remember it) was one of the original examples of food provenance as nearby they had a dairy farm, an egg farm and a barley farm to provide the main ingredients.
 |
| Ovaltine apartments |
We went through Hunton Bridge then down and up House Lane before heading to Sarrett. As we all had fairly fat tyres we descended to Sarrett Bottom then went along the concrete track to cross the River Chess and used Holloway Lane to climb up to Chenies. We spotted a new outdoor café (Crestyl café) at the Watercress farm by the Chess bridge which is open Friday to Sunday 10am-4pm.
 |
Holloway Lane
|
Holloway Lane is tarmacked but rather narrow as you can see in the photo above. We dropped down into Chorleywood and climbed to Heronsgate, where we decided to shortcut to Maple Cross by going down past the Land of Liberty, Peace and Plenty pub, then riding down the dual carriageway slip-road of the M25 to approach the cafe using a brand-new cycle-path that delivered us to the door.
 |
| Liver dinner |
After Steve and I ordered our bacon rolls, a svelte Gary shocked us by ordering a low-carb liver dinner, substituting mushrooms for chips. We were also surprised at the enormous bottle of ketchup. It was labelled as 1.3kg and my photo doesn't do it justice
 |
| 1.3 Kg tomato ketchup |
Afterwards we returned via the edge of Rickmansworth and Chorleywood bottom where we encountered traffic hold-ups caused by huge cars being too wide for a narrow lane. An easy run through Chandlers Cross and Abbotts Langley saw us back in St Albans before 2pm after 36 miles. We didn't see any rain really, just a few spots here and there.
No comments:
Post a Comment