Saturday was supposed to be a tourist trip to London, but alas that fell through at the last minute. Luckily Simon swooped in with a trip over to the forest of dean for a bit of cross-country bike malar­key. I grabbed a lift from the G-Dog and despite getting caught up in some closed road shenanigans en-route, we eventu­ally arrived and met up with Si and Emma at the cycle centre.

After the usual exten­ded faffing we headed off around the FODCA trail, me on the ‘dale, Garry on the shiny Enduro, Simon on his Yeti DH6 and Emma on a tiny Spesh Hardrock.

The trail is only about 4km or so long, but that’s 4km of technical, swoopy, rooty joy. None of us were on top form, strug­gling up the climbs and depos­it­ing ourselves ungrace­fully in the dirt on the descents. Garry even managed to pull an SPD-cleat right out of his shoe at one point.

It was all good fun though, especially the final section of the trail which is a slice of fast swoopy single­track from bike-heaven. WOOP!

After a quick bite to eat we set off again, for a nice relax­ing half-hour jaunt down the fireroads to the lake. It quickly became a jaunt that took us miles off-course and signi­fic­antly more than half an hour.

Fireroads aren’t the most inter­est­ing things in the world, but the slog was well worth it. We eventu­ally found ourselves at the top of some lovely single­track which took us across the top of the hill before diving steeply down the side, taking us nearly all the way back to the cycle centre. Lovely stuff.