Ridge Road Ramble

Last night we got some fairly heavy rain but after a couple of early showers in the morning, things fined up pretty nicely.  As I lay in bed last night listening to the rain I imagined the nice things it was doing to the local gravel roads - the dust would be disappearing and the gravel settling down nicely.  I thought a wee gravel fix would definitely be worth investigating...

So, just after 10 this morning, I had the DL ready and after a quick top off of the tank I headed out of town for the nearest bit of gravel I could find.  This turned out to be Watershed Road and it was a great taste of what was to come.

More gravel on Midland Road took me across to the seal on Valley Road.  But not for long,  I turned off Valley Road and onto Zig Zag Road for more of the fun stuff.

At the end of Zig Zag Road I went left instead of the right (zigged when I should have zagged I guess) I should have taken and ended up running out of gravel on Finnis Road.  I was forced to turn around and scoot back up Finnis Road to carry on with the route that was sort of planned...

On the right track again I finally turned onto Ridge Road which was the main event for the day.  This is a great ride and takes you along either side of a "ridge" all the way through to Apiti.  The road surface was in great nick for most of the length of the road although there was a small section where there was a bit of deeper gravel.  The great views hadn't gone anywhere since last time either...

Towards the end of the road it opens up a bit more and is great fun on the Vee:

In Apiti I was starting to feel a bit peckish so turned back towards home thinking that a bite in Kimbolton might be a bit of plan.

Kimbolton locals

But when I dropped into Kimbolton I could spy some big black clouds heading Northwards towards Palmy.  I decided that I'd rather be hungry than soaking wet so got on the gas and headed for home.

The rain caught up to me along the Colyton-Fielding straight and it got quite wet for a 5 or 10 minutes.  Luckily my worn-out front tyre behaved itself and we safely splashed our way home where I managed to rustle up that lunch I'd been looking forward to.

This was probably my first decent gravel squirt since taking ScooterBob up to National Park and it was a real cracker - the gravel conditions were nigh on perfect and the big Vee really enjoyed the exercise (although it was quite thirsty for some reason).