An Uphill Workout

The trouble with riding a bike around here is that you are never far from having to peddle uphill. For today's 'daily exercise' away from The Cottage, we rode straight up the hill behind us. It was far from ideal in terms of having a warm-up, but did give us plenty of exercise and some new views from above the valley. In some ways, it is great cycling conditions as everyone has to stay at home, but it did feel weird having the road to ourselves for most of the ride as we only saw a couple of cars.

In a 'there and back' ride up the hill, we traveled about 18km and in doing so, pretty much covered more vertical height than we did in an entire summer of cycling up the west coast of Sweden a few summers ago! At the high point, we lay down and watched the clouds, while re-fuelling with a tuna sandwich.

It was nice to see over to Snowdon again.

There was a bitterly cold easterly wind blowing, which had us working hard on the way up as we battled into it on every other zigzag, but for the descent, we had to put on extra windproof trousers and big gloves and down jackets to keep warm. The wind chill was tremendous and caused tears to pour from my eyes as we 'battled' downhill into the wind. At times, we even had to peddle downhill to prevent the wind from stopping us!

Having left the views of the lake at Llanberis, it was a delightful downhill all the way, passing only a couple of dog walkers at a 2m berth.