Owen, relaxing in Kings Park, Perth, Australia.

See more photos taken on 16th May 2006, or all of my photos from Australia and Brunei.

Friday: Leckhampton Hill, Orange 222.

It all came together today: The sun was out, the ground was dry and most of The Hills Have Eyes crew were riding. Simon was up there, so as is traditional, we spent a good while sessioning stuff. Great fun was had on Stu’s Roosty corners – driftorama! Nick and Si were getting proper sideways on the way through there, Sam Hill stylee. Proper bo!

Saturday: Gethin, Orange 222.

Myself, Anton, Nick and Brett headed over to Gethin in South Wales for the Dragon Downhill uplift day. Unfortunately, the uplift part of the day was shrouded in controversy, but the riding itself was fantastic.

First, the uplift: New Health & Safety regulations were recently introduced, meaning that bikes and bikers need to be separated on the uplift trucks, bikers must be seated and helmets must be worn on-board. The trucks are also speed-limited. No bad thing in itself, except that it halved the number of bikes that could fit onto a truck (we were managing 19-20 per truck), which meant massive queues and plenty of disgruntled riders. Jason Carpenter told us that there were 150 riders on the day and they were only getting 98 up the hill every hour. Clearly that’s not good enough and there is work to be done. Still, kudos and thanks to Jason and the team for sticking with it. Without them we wouldn’t have the Dragon Downhill series at all.

As for the riding, Gethin continues to be one of the best DH tracks I have ever ridden: It’s pretty easy to ride down it (for the most part), but damn hard to ride down there fast. Nobody seems to really enjoy the first section, but then you turn into the woods, put down a couple of pedal strokes and the fun begins: berm, jump, berm, drop, berm… so much fun all the way to the bottom. I was death-gripping through some sections and making lots of whoops and BWAARRP! noises. The cameras caught Nick and myself. Really need to learn to look further down the trail…

Sunday: Leckhampton Hill, Cannondale Prophet.

It started out as a fairly normal XC ride with Weon (who unfortunately had his bike stolen the very next day). We rode up and around the back of Leckhampton, before dropping down “the dragon’s tail”. On the way back up we met a guy on an old Cannondale Super-V 1000. I really wanted one of those back in the day. We agreed to show him some of the trails leading down the hill. I don’t know if it was a competitive instinct or just plain showing off, but something made me push a little bit harder than normal. The result: Me and the Prophet finally clicked.

Up until now it’s been a good bike, but today it became great. I was riding it with all the confidence I’ve regained on the 222 over the past couple of days. Those first couple of corners at the top of the DH tracks are amazing and unlike the 222, the Prophet can be flicked (rather than hauled) through them. That lightness counts through the following berm too – it carries speed beautifully. Ace with a capital A.

Oh, and we scared the crap out of the guy on the Super-V.

Monday: Leckhampton Hill, Cannondale Prophet.

Nick had offered me a lift up the hill with my 222, but I’d had so much fun on the Prophet on Sunday that I decided to ride up on that instead. This time I was hitting everything quickly – Stu (on his Mr Big) was only getting away from me where the track got really steep.

Everything up there that I’ve hit on the 222 has now been ridden on the Prophet. It’s not as easy or as quick (yet), but it’s all doable. Time to push the boundaries a bit further on the 222 methinks. “Brett’s Drop Line”, “2nd Coming” and “La Raclette” need to be conquered properly…

I found a couple of old hard drives lying around at home the other day, so I plugged them in to see if there was anything interesting on there.

I’m quite glad I did really, because I found a shed-load of pictures from my various digital cameras stretching right back to a trip to Afan Argoed in the year 2000. So now I’m slowly but surely backfilling my Flickr stream with some of the better ones. So when you see pictures of out-dated bikes and kit popping up, that’s why – although I still seem to have a lot of that kit now…

If nothing else it’s a great showcase of just how far budget digital cameras have come on over the years. Compare this photo from 2000 to this one from the other day: It’s quite a leap forward.

Update: Flickr caught-up!

A couple of weeks later and I think I’ve finally finished wading through them all now. Follow the links for pictures from 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004. Normal (shonky) service might resume at some point…

I’ve been wanting to redesign this place for ages, but I’ve never really found the time or indeed motivation to do it properly. I needed to change the look with absolute minimum effort for me: I figured a new header image was probably the easiest way to do it, so that’s exactly what I’ve done (it should look like this – you may need to hit reload or clear your cache if you’re not seeing it).

G-Dog gets his five minutes of fame this time. You can tell the pictures are quite old – he’s riding an Orange 222 (You’re my bike now Dave!). They were taken back in July of last year up on Leckhampton Hill , then amalgamated in Photoshop. Yes, I know it all needs a bit of tweaking – especially the navigation. I’ll get around to it at some point.

Oh and a completely unrelated HAPPY BIRTHDAY BAGGUS!

I managed to drag myself up Cleeve Hill today. I rode along the Honeybourne Cycle Path until it’s conclusion, across through Prestbury, then took the climb up Mill Lane. It was absolutely horrible – really hard work to get anywhere (although it’s much nicer having gears for that climb), then when I finally got to the off-road bit, I seemed to have lost any skill and poise I might once have had. Every attempt to ride up a techno-rocky section saw me stall before flailing wildly trying to get a foot out of the SPDs. I’ll conquer that one yet, just you wait.

It was well worth it though. The sun came out just as I reached the top of the climb, making everything seem worthwhile.

I rode to the masts, then followed the road the to moto-cross area, before heading down the rocky descent into Prestbury. I was feeling much more confident this time, riding straight through sections that had me beaten last time. Typical then, that I should meet a Land Rover coming up towards me. I had to stop and scramble up the banking to get out of the way. Fair play though, it went straight up stuff no car has any right to climb.

The rest of the descent seemed to have a river flowing down it, which served to remind me of two things: Firstly, I need to fit a Crud Catcher to the front of that bike (or maybe even my ‘zocchi fender if I’ve still got it) and secondly, I still need to get myself some riding glasses, to stop any cack that a Crud Catcher doesn’t. AARRGGHHH, I’M BLIIINNNNDDD!!!

I’ve bunged the pictures on Flickr if you’re interested.

I was self-googling earlier, just to see to myriad places in which I appear these days. It’s amazing what you can dig up doing that.

Years ago, back when I used to work in the CBT industry, I spent a lot of time copying and pasting graphics things in and out of Photoshop. You know, things like For this diagram, turn on layers 1,3,6,17 and 20, then when use user clicks the button, turn on layers 2, 5, 6, 14 and 21. Eventually I tired of this and put together a series of Photoshop actions to make these things easier. Turn on the layers you need, click the button and you’ve got a finished graphic to put into your multimedia thingy – that sort of thing.

The thing is, I had entirely forgotten that I’d even made this thing, let alone that I’d uploaded somewhere. So as you can imagine, it was quite a surprise when I found that it’s still floating around in the Adobe Studio Exchange. What’s more, 3365 people have downloaded it over the years. Bonkers. I’ve no idea if it even works with a modern version of Photoshop.

OK, so it’s not that amazing.