Say good bye to the summer, autumn’s here with a vengeance.

Myself and Weon had a fairly typical autum­nal ride. We encountered everything from blazing sunshine to torren­tial rains with howling winds chucked in for good measure. The leaves carpet­ing the ground made navig­at­ing some of the unfamil­iar trails an inter­est­ing exercise in guess­work. They were all still on the trees the last time I was there. Still, we didn’t get lost at all.

We blasted down dry hard-packed single-track and ploughed through axle-deep bogs. We sheltered from the weather in a forest and ate cake, fruit and chocol­ate. We wheel-span up slick wet grass hillsides and picked our way down rocky technical descents that had us shout­ing explet­ives as the bikes misbe­haved beneath us. We kept riding until we were both completely and utterly exhausted.

It added up to about 30 mainly off-road miles all in all. I feel a bit broken now, but with that satisifed “I did good stuff today” feeling. Rocking.

I really should have cleaned the bike when I got back.