The Tour de Yorkshire

Every now and then, life serves up a pleasant surprise - such as a brand spanking new, top flight bicycle race finishing at the bottom of the road where you live:

The race is Gary Verity's baby. The Welcome to Yorkshire chief executive was pretty keen to make sure the Tour de France's visit to Yorkshire last year left a lasting legacy, and this - with a bit of luck - will be it.

It deserves to be. Even though the Tour de Yorkshire was not enlivened by an epic, fixie prompted pile up - oh, I know you've seen the video already, but shall we just have one more look? It doesn't make you a bad person...

 Oooof! Blimey!

I do sneakily love the brief shoulder check he does after he goes under the tape: "Oh, the peloton's coming. I reckon I can keep up, I'll  just go for it."

...erm yes, so even though it wasn't enlivened by an epic fixie prompted pile up, it was incredibly exciting. The race came bombing down the hill to Peasholm Park, and then climbed up into town, behind where me, Mrs L and the girls were stood; so we heard it pass in a rush of cheers, the noise of the bikes and the clatter of the camera helicopter - which was incredibly low. See if you can spot it in the pictures below.

The commentary over the speakers really brought home the speed that the thing was moving at, naming landmarks that take a good few minutes to walk between ten or twenty seconds apart.

Then the leaders popped into view around the castle headland, with Lars Petter Nordhaug leading the charge.

The field was really spread out, which I wasn't expecting. While I knew without a shadow of a doubt that the stage route would have put me in my grave if I'd tried to ride it, there are no mountains to climb; so I'd kind of imagined that the peloton might saunter across the line together, eagerly chatting about whether to have their post ride pint at the Newcastle Packet or the Golden Ball...

There were acres of carbon fibre, but Team Madison Genesis were there too, with their extremely lovely, stainless steel Volare team bike.

Mrs L, who I have previously assumed is allergic to cycling, then insisted on spending a giggly ten minutes outside Team Wiggins' luxury motor home, trying to catch a glimpse of Sir Bradley trying to make brews for ten men with only a travel kettle:

"Oi Mark. Is it free sugars or four?"

After a good night's kip, I decided that - far from putting me in the ground - riding a bit of Stage 1 would make me feel fabulous.

It was a beautiful morning. There was some rain knocking around, but it was as if it had been turned off immediately before I opened the back door.

The tour followed the River Derwent up to Langdale End, an incredibly pretty hamlet perched on the ridge between two branches of the valley. It has a superb pub called the Moorcock. Even though it wasn't open yet, I could at least stop, take a picture and breath in the beery goodness emanating from its stout stone walls - all simple pleasures denied the peloton the day before.

I know I'm in danger of overusing the word beautiful in relation to this bit of the world, but it really does feel like whoever made it was putting in some extra effort. I love the contrast between the miniature scale of the twisting road and the solid farmhouses, and the looming hills and slopes behind.

Eventually the road leads to Bickley Gate, the back door to Dalby Forest. This is a naughty little climb, with a hairpin bend part of the way up...

...which scrubs off all of the momentum that you really need for the precipice beyond. I was on the more rubbish of my two Viscounts, and in spite of sticking it into bottom gear (and wiggling the gear lever a bit, just in case there were some more gears I'd forgotten about) there was a lot of sweating, swearing and grunting involved in getting to the top.

"Allez? Yeah right...", I thought, hating the massive chasm between my willpower and ambition.

It's so going on ebay. And the money it makes is getting spent on gears. Massive, hill climbing gears with cogs the same diameter as Frank Sidebottom's head.

As is the way on these Saturday morning rides, I more or less had the road to myself. This spotless MGB passed me on the way back down the valley, looking very much at home.

The ride was lovely, but there was another treat when I got home. Some of the pro riders the day before had logged their rides on Strava; so where I'd managed manged just shy of six miles per hour up Howden Hill, Etienne van Empel took it at a somewhat more brisk fourteen and half. And then did another 100km or so of the same right aftrewards.

He did have to wear a LOT of orange stretchy clothes while he was doing it though.

Troutsdale

Well I loved my first go at exploring the North Yorkshire Moors so much that I even hauled myself out of bed again - at an equally horrible hour of the morning - the following weekend, to go and get myself another load of only half tame rural loveliness.

This was a few weeks ago, when the calendar was still hedging its bets about whether it was winter or spring. But I'd seen one slightly nervous looking daffodil while I was out the weekend before on the sludgy green bike, along with a lot of heavily pregnant sheep; so I was happy to conclude that spring was here and with it, Drop Bar Season.

The weekend before, I'd got the sludgy green bike out. And while it is a drop barred bike in the sense that it has has... er... drop handlebars, in every other way it is not a drop barred bike. It is basically camouflaged, whereas as drop barred bikes should always be racy and flamboyant. It has a rack on the back, whereas a really lovely drop barred bike will have had things that you might find useful carefully omitted as part of the design process, to enhance its sleek, elemental beauty and prevent you from mistakenly using it to go to the Co-Op for some milk and a cheeky Ginsters..

This time, I needed a proper drop barred bike. I needed to take the Aerospace.  

Feeling a bit like Arnie in Commando where he punches a code into his garden shed and opens the door to reveal racks of guns, I wiggled the key in the rusty bike shed padlock.

The Aerospace has been hibernating over the winter - which I think was the right decision, given that both Langsett family cars have ended up a sort of uniform beige colour (with a slightly pebble dashed finish). It wasn't pristine, but it still looked absolutely belting as I wheeled it out of the shed, with its almost anodized, metallic grey and blue paint. There was that lovely moment where I lifted it and thought "Damn! This is a light bike!"

I jumped aboard and sent the Aerospace up Red Scar Lane, feeling ridiculously pleased about the way that the forty year old Shimano Crane derailleur clicked the chain over to the big cog, and the general lack of noise from the bike. I followed the winding road through Raincliffe Woods to the Derwent valley, which cuts north through rising ground towards the moors proper. It was chilly and pretty cloudy, but there was that lovely fresh smell of plants starting to grow again, and another crowd of sheep "baaah!"ing at me from the fields.

I'd had a look at the map since my ride the week before, and realised that the brilliant view I'd got at the highest point of the ride was of Troutsdale, a beautiful valley which branches off the valley of the Derwent. It looked like there was a road looping west through Troutsdale, then south again to the Vale of Pickering. On the map, Troutsdale just got narrower and higher until it merged with the high moor on either side. "Might be a bit of a climb there.", I thought.

The ride was absolutely lovely. Apart from the sheep and the pheasants, I had the whole beautiful valley to myself. I followed the road where it branched from the lane leading up to Langdale and the back door to Dalby Forest. There was a giddy little descent which bottomed out with a gravelly rush over a bridge, and then the road started to climb steadily up the northern side of the valley.

It was around this time that I started to think about Victorian road builders, and how I might have a few suggestions for the presumably top hatted and well whiskered gentlemen who planned the lane which I was following, as it pointed up hills with a casual disregard for gradient. There was a very handsome house - Troutsdale Lodge - perched high up on the hillside, and a particularly punishing step up in the road leading up to it. It must have been hilarious to have been faced to the job of carting shooting parties up here. It was pretty jolly trying to force my enormously heavy - but useless - legs to turn the Aerospace's pedals.

But as I went past the Lodge, I could see that the road levelled out and I was actually pretty close to the top to the slope. I could see up towards the head of the valley too -

- and hang on, I thought, isn't that the chuffing road again, all the way down there in the bottom of the valley, when what I would really like is for it to just follow the contour line around the rim?

Well yes, that's exactly what it was, and I had ten minutes of hanging on to the Aerospace while it roared all the way down the hill, thinking about how I would shortly have to wind it all the way to the top again to get out of the valley.

But - BUT! - the sun was finding a few gaps in the cloud, and Troutsdale was still looking absolutely lovely. The climb had a proper Alpine hairpin two thirds of the way up, which I looked at with an amount of panic as I tried to wind a line through the corner which wasn't vertical. There wasn't one, and I cheated by jumping off and wheeling the bike through the corner. But then I stormed the last bit of the climb and all of the sudden I was over the top and looking down the gentle slope into the Vale of Pickering and the northern slopes of the Wolds. Brilliant, and absolutely worth the whole being drenched in sweat and feeling like I was about to pass out thing. Perhaps I don't need more than a twenty five out back after all, I thought.

The Tour de Yorkshire is coming this way later this week (though it will be heading through Langdale rather than Troutsdale) so I'll have one of those lovely opportunities which riding a bike occasionally throws up to watch the pro peloton traversing road that nearly killed me without any visible effort.

That was the hard work done with. I had a great run back down into the Vale of Pickering, picking up the main road at Snainton and then heading back east to Scarborough. The bike worked perfectly and, like all great bikes, felt like there was someone else helping spin the pedals.

So look, here's the thing. It is really self indulgent of me to write about me riding my bike, and expect you to read it. But I've got a noble purpose in mind. My guess is that most people don't even know this perfect landscape of empty, twisting lanes and quiet valleys is here. Strava reckons that in the whole of human history 337 people have ridden the stretch up Troutsdale. So if you're getting a bit bored of your regular routes, you could do a lot worse than getting yourself up here with your bike and giving it a go.

Backwoods

Good lord it was nippy last Saturday!

The girls were (sensibly) still asleep when I fell stupidly out of bed and, like someone in the grip of a terrible addiction, tiptoed silently down to the bike shed...

...which, being made out of tin sheets, made a huge "BONG!" noise when I opened the door.

The neighbours must love me.

There was a short climb, up Red Scar Lane, right at the start of the ride. I was hoping it would make me feel like a Nietzchean superman, in that confusing way that pounding up a steep hill on a machine fundamentally unsuited to gradients sometimes does, but instead it just made me feel "ARRRRGH!"

In fact that's what hills should be called from now on, ARRRGH!s.

Notice too how the namers of this fine street tried to warn off the unwary by giving it a ferocious name.

Anyway, climb done, there was a run through beautiful Forge Valley, followed by a bit of A-road. I was out so early that there were only two or three cars on the stretch out to Brompton, which is where I turned off.

Brompton is one of a string of villages sited in the crease where the flat bottom of the Vale of Pickering turns into the southernmost slope of the North Yorkshire Moors. This was the bit of countryside I really wanted to explore. I rolled the bike up a long, steady climb, until all of a sudden I was in Wykeham Forest, which was a dead ringer for a first season X-Files filming location.

"Wykeham Nursery"? Oh sure.

There were even sinister biosecurity warning signs.

And long, eery roads through the forest that just lead to ... more forest.

Throughout this long, long ride, I more or less had the road to myself. I only passed one car, at the exact moment that I realised that I could no longer feel my deep-frozen feet and was staggering around the verge, wiggling my toes and trying to return some sort of circulation to them.

Then, the road turned right, and I could see light through the trees:

Even through the early morning mist, the view was well worth the climb. It looks a tiny bit Swiss, doesn't it?

I could hear sheep in the valley below - whose name I did not know - calling out "Bar! Bar!" to each other in their Yorkshire accents. But there were none of the noises associated with humans.

Ideally, I wanted to get down into the valley below, as I was fairly sure the river at the bottom was the Derwent; and that would take me back to Scarborough through the back door. And there was actually a wonky sign post, with a board telling me I was on the Moor to Sea cycle route, and that I could follow it to Scarborough. But the signpost was pointing unconvincingly towards a clump of fir trees and a churned up forest track, so I stuck to the tarmac road.

Regular readers will note that I let the Sludgy Green Bike out of the shed. That was because, even though it was cold, the calendar said it was the last day of February, or (in the cycling calendar) the start of Drop Bar Season. A single nervous daffodil by the side of the road backed up this conclusion. All of a sudden, the flat bars on the Inferno just look wrong, while the curly wurly drop bars on my two Viscounts look racy and fast.

The greens and browns of the pine forest even made the most of the Sludgy Green Bike's sludgy green paint. As I churned up the four and a half mile climb that was the payment for the view above, I thought happily to myself about sticking the Sludgy Green Bike on a popular internet auction site, and spending the fifteen to twenty English pounds that it might make on a good day on something frivolous.

Looking at it leaning against that bench with that lovely secret valley behind it though, I started to warm to the thing in spite of myself.

I thought about the quiet magic of exploring by bike. I'd only ridden four and a half miles away from the A-road at the bottom of the hill, but I had the world to myself. Edward Abbey put it like this: "Distance and space are functions of speed and time. Without spending a single dollar from the United States Treasury we could, if we wanted to, multiply the area of our national parks tenfold or a hundredfold - simply by banning the private automobile (from them)."

Not a man to mince his words, Mr Abbey. But he's making a point worth thinking about there: my own ride through this corner of the North Yorkshire Moors National Park could have been over and done with in twenty minutes in a car. But I would have missed the satisfaction of climbing the hill myself. And I would have missed the joy of screaming back down it, rolling on tyres made in Sri Lanka. While the civil war was still being fought. That retail for £5.99 (including shipping). And I would have missed the view through that little window in the tree line entirely.

Scarbjorca

The first day that I took the Viscount over to Scarborough was the day of the second stage of the Tour, and I remember - and this is a first for me - feeling genuinely excited, because the new job and having the whole of the Yorkshire Coast to ride were so closely linked. I kept catching myself thinking, "I hope I get this job, so that I can smoke round these beautiful lanes on my bike…" . The feeling was particularly strong where the motorway crossed the route of the Tour. Looking down at the aftermath of the great race triggered a pretty powerful urge to pull over on the hard shoulder, get the Viscount out of the back of the car and chase the Tour down. When I arrived in Scarborough, I was so keen to get on the bike and explore that I ended up doing a sort of running triathlete's stumble*, like Bambi on rollerskates, as I tried to saddle up, and ride away all at the same time.

Up on the saddle, with the evening breeze rushing past, it was immediately obvious that this was going to be a different experience than I was used to. Ever since my cycling dark ages came to an end, I’ve been setting off on bike rides in Manchester, which is to say, on an absolutely level surface. Gravity treats you more or less with ambivalence when you’re on the flat. The bike accelerates exactly as fast as you can push it. You have to ride for quite a while before you find out whether your ride is going to be characterised by going faster and further than you expected, or shorter and slower.

In Scarborough, on the other hand, there are very few roads that don’t have a fairly decisive gradient on them. This one pointed nicely downhill towards the sea, so each pedal push downwards was matched by a cheeky little shove back up as gravity did its stuff. " Go on," gravity was saying, "give it some beans! This downhill could last for ever, and when it does point uphill, you’ll probably be going so fast you’ll coast right to the top." A very silly, wind blown smile was plastered across my face, as the Viscount quickly approached Fred "Woo Hoo Hoo Hoo"speed *. "I wonder whether the North Bay will look as amazing as I remember it?" I thought, and in about ten seconds I was there, noting that yes, it did, and hoping that I did not do something which defined me as unemployable at my interview the following day.

Once I’d settled in, I started to get ambitious. Not just on my own behalf, but on behalf of all the people in the country who love cycling, but have never made it over here to the coast.

Taking the Viscount round the twists and turns of Forge Valley - entirely on my own in spite of it being a beautiful, early autumn evening - I thought to myself, "This place is amazing! It should be as popular with cyclists as Majorca. I should be getting overtaken right now by some remorseless professional chaingang, scything past on their plastic bikes."

Majorca is great of course. Me, Mrs L and Kate went there in 2012. I hadn't been since the '80's, so I had no idea that it had become a sun kissed bike riding paradise and its status as such played no part in my selection of it as a holiday destination. No, really! But there they were: thousands of bikes, of all shapes and sizes, zipping up and down the big wide bike lane, next to the road leading from Port de Pollenca to Alcudia.

In the hotel where we stayed there was a pretty spectacular Max Hurzeler bike hire station, whose meticulous Austrian manager rode this beautiful titanium Colnago:

Bit of close up?

Yum.

The Colnago was, as you can see, spotless. And so was everything else. I borrowed an aluminium Cube touring bike (in the Continental rather than the British sense of the word) and it looked like it had been delivered from the factory immediately before I climbed aboard.

South of Port de Pollensa were salt marshes. North were the fierce looking mountains of the Serra de Tramuntana. I rode them both, and particularly enjoyed winding the Cube all the way to the top of the mountains, round twisting hairpin bends, until I could see the whole Bay of Pollenca beneath me.

It was a brilliant week, and the island thoroughly deserves its reputation as one of the great cycling destinations. But Scarborough – and the countryside around it – is probably equally deserving of such a reputation.

Let’s start with traffic. There’s a certain satisfaction to be derived from avoiding death or serious injury on a busy city street, but cycling is undeniably more pleasurable if you don’t have to worry about cars, trucks and buses all of the time. This bit of the world just doesn’t have that many motor vehicles in it. If I’m out on my bike and I particularly want to see some cars, then there are probably three or four roads where they will definitely put in an appearance. But if you’d rather just enjoy the scenery, you can do that too. The natural state of a motor vehicle in this part of the world is a mossy Land Rover, sitting in a farmyard, with one wheel missing.

And what scenery it is. I can’t promise you mountains, but there's a British speciality instead; high, wild, heather clad moorland. Round here, the moors are riven by steep sided valleys with woods on the slopes, so sudden that there is a corner where the top of the valley side meets the moorland above. Steep slopes means climbs of course, and there are plenty of vicious, short ramps which will leave you bathed in sweat and anxiously Googling the symptoms of a heart attack when you reach the top.

If all that sounds a bit tiring, there’s the Vale of Pickering: a wide, shallow valley perfect for clocking up fast road miles. The Vale is littered with lovely villages, each one stocked with the kind of pubs which I imagine will start to look more or less irresistible half way through a ride on a warm summer evening. Then to the south there are the Yorkshire Wolds. These are a new kind of terrain for me; a slightly eerie, empty chalk upland with villages nestling in the hollows and twisting roads. And last of all, there’s the sea. OK, so you can’t ride in it, but there is something magical about having it as a companion while you’re on your bike. North of Scarborough, National Cycle Network Route 1 uses the trackbed of the old Scarborough – Whitby railway line to take you up the coast. Unlike the road – which runs a mile or two inland, and only gives you brief glimpses of the sea – the railway line never strays far from the cliff top, letting you look down into secret bays, or southwards to Scarborough Castle and the towering cliffs at Bempton.

NCN Route 1 has one of the greatest "ta-da!" views in the land. From Scarborough there is a more or less constant climb from 50 or 60 feet in elevation to a much more chunky 615 feet at Ravenscar. You’re no sooner aware that you’ve finished climbing than the sea appears, far below and with a horizon half way to Denmark. Then the whole, wonderful sweep of Robin Hoods Bay opens up in front of you.

There are some great businesses here already, helping people get the most out of riding this bit of the world. Pete and Anne Blood's Let's Bike Scarborough will drop off a spotless and capable Specialized mountain bike - one of these in fact

- outside wherever you're staying. And when you've finished ripping round the countryside on it, they will come and pick it up, clean it to within an inch of its life and loan it to someone else the next day. If you're not absolutely sure about how to avoid broken bones on the "...berms, large rocks, medium steps, drop offs, cambers (and) water crossings..." of the red route through Dalby Forest, Pete will guide you through it.

This is a business very much in the same mould as that spotless Max Hurzeler rental station I was getting excited about a little further up the page. When I excitedly blurted out "I love that you don't have rubbish bikes like other hire places do!", Pete calmly explained his belief that North Yorkshire had some of the best riding in the country, and that it shouldn't be spoiled by riding it on poorly maintained, worn out machinery.  Bike About Filey offer a similar service - plus repairs if your own bike breaks - if you're riding a little further south.

Scarborough's Lord and Lady Mayoress Andrew and Sue Backhouse fell for cycling in such a big way last year that they put together a gruelling 200 mile tour round the Borough of Scarborough involving - naturally - 14,000ft of climbing. This year, the original punishing tour has spawned two slightly more manageable sportives (one centred on Whitby, one on Scarborough) as well as a repeat of the 200 mile monster.

Scarborough doesn't need to reinvent the wheel. All it needs to do is polish the current offer and tell everyone about it. The accommodation is there already, although it needs to be tuned to match visitor expectations. There is a really good tourism organisation working to promote the Yorkshire coast, which would, I'm sure, do a great job of telling riders how much Scarborough has to offer. There are already some superb places to ride, and with some effort and investment, there could be many more.  This has been done before. A couple of years ago, Eden Borough Council funded a similar effort to market its patch as a cycling destination, and to improve its existing offer. Routes were compiled. A Sportive was organised. A list of cycle friendly accommodation was put together. The funding only lasted for a year and a half, but there's a good chance a lasting legacy will come out of it.

And I think Scarborough can do better. Scarborough's existence is a triumph over geography. Built at the end of a road which goes nowhere else but the North Sea, the town is used to getting people to make a leap of faith just to get them here. And the trick is to realise that if you're telling bike riders about the Yorkshire Coast, you're not even asking them to make a leap of faith. You can stumble on a great ride here by just saddling up and setting off. 

*Courtesy of Bike Snob NYC

The move - Part 2

"We could try further out." said Mrs L, after we'd realised that every house we could afford in York was miniature. Or suffered from some other massive disadvantage (toilet in a shed, one bedroom three foot wide but fifteen foot long - that kind of thing).

I booted up a map on Rightmove. "The problem" I opined "is that York is surrounded by this flat, featureless, twenty mile wide Donut of Crapness in every direction. All of these places would rot my soul. What about properly further out? What about Malton?"

"Tories." said Mrs L. "And too horsey."

"You like horses."

"But I don't want to look like one. I'm worried there might be something in the water."

"Hmm."

Some time passed.

"You know, the train from the 'borough's not bad. 45 minutes."

We'd talked about moving to Scarborough before. In fact, we'd talked about it at all levels of seriousness, from actually doing maths to see whether we could afford it, to drunken new-years'-eve wishful thinking, for years. Mrs L grew up there. We both love the legendary North Yorkshire seaside town. If you're unfamilar with it, you might be wondering, "Why?" I'll do my best to explain.

An idiot once rhetorically asked on on internet forum why you would visit Scarborough if you didn't want to visit Cash Convertors or Wetherspoons. Well, you might like surfing, or mountain biking, or sailing. Or Regency architecture. Or Alan Ayckbourn. Or knights and castles. Or fiercely independent businesses. Or the most amazing countryside. Or literally having the muck and tiredness sand blasted off your face by the wind coming off the North Sea.

Scarborough is, in short, amazing. It is not one of those seaside towns which is born out of a resigned reaction to geography ("Oh look, the land stops here and a muddy, freezing sea starts. We'd better build a pier and stuff."). Scarborough is the creation of glaciers and crashing seas, of chilly Romans and Vikings, of castellans and hard as nails fishermen, of Regency dandies and Victorian architects who breathed in the fresh, somehow more filling seaside air and just went slightly crackers.

Travelling over to Scarborough by rail or road is a steadily building assault on your senses. Leaving York behind, you'll drive through that Donut of Crapness I was going on about to Mrs L earlier. There are dealerships selling slightly faded ex-RAC vans. And the Original Factory Shop, with its sign advertising "Coach Parties Welcome!" to a car park so empty as to be sinster. And a curry restaurant, named after notoriously grumpy founding father of Pakistan Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

Then - quite suddenly - the slope of the Howardian Hills rises up in front of you. The  hills are named after the Howard family, who wisely chose them as the location of their slightly over the top country pile. If your're lucky enough to be on the train, you'll be winding your way through Kirkham Gorge, past the ruins of Kirkham Priory. The River Derwent runs beside the railway, having blasted out a twisting path through the hills in the last ice age. Beyond is the Vale of Pickering, a wide, shallow valley with the Yorkshire Wolds rising up on your right and the southern slopes of the North Yorkshire Moors two or three miles away to the left. Suddenly, all the buildings have red pantile roofs and are beautiful. The valley runs all the way to the coast, although it is blocked at its seaward end by a jumble of low hills - essentially rubble dropped by passing glaciers. In the last ice age, the Vale was a huge lake, and the scarps of the Moors and Wolds were its shores.

If you're driving, then you might at this point turn left, and cross the valley floor to Snainton, one of a string of lovely villages sited where the lands starts to rise towards the North Yorkshire Moors. You might not realise it, but you're getting really close to Scarborough now. After Ayton, the road starts to climb the hills, giving you a view rights across the Vale of Pickering to the Wolds.

You really need to be doing this particular bit at sunset. And if possible, in a vehicle with seats set higher than normal.

As you climb the hill towards Jacobs Mount, you might look over to your right. And if the setting sun if just at the right angle, it will be lighting up the hundred metre tall face of Bempton Cliffs, ten or more miles away to the south, turning the mucky white chalk to a glowing rose colour.

Bempton is where the chalk hills of the Wolds dramatically terminate, showing a towering, vertical face to the North Sea. The cliffs march south all the way to Flamborough Head, a huge step in the horizon, bulging past the vertical.

Then, in four or five seconds or less, you'll be over the top of the hill, and Scarborough will be before you - two bays, divided by the castle on its diamond shaped hill. There might be a few street lights shining, and a gathering blue darkness in the hills and woods to you left. And all along the horizon, the sea.

We've been coming to Scarborough regularly for years. But as soon as we started to think seriously about moving here, the tone of the visits changed. Mrs L started to eye up towering Victorian houses in a slightly possessive way. We experienced the magic of driving into Scarborough on a Sunday evening, listening to the rhythmic "Wush...wush...wush..." noise of us passing stationary traffic, queuing the other way, bearing its occupants away from the coast and back to a working week with no prospect of sticking your toes in the sea at all.

"Of course, there's not a hope in hell that I'll be able to get a job over there." I said gloomily, before setting out on my swiftest and most productive job hunt ever.

I started writing this blog so I didn't have to tell Mrs L in quite the exhaustive level of detail I naturally favour about how awesome each of my bike rides has been.

So of course you might guess that I was excited about trying the bike out around Scarborough.

Which is why I bundled the Viscount in the back of the car when I came over for my job interviews, along with my suit and shiny shoes, and jumped straight on it when I got to Scarborough. And I've been doing a bit of exploring, and coming up with a few ideas...

The Tour de France

You might have been wondering when the Tour would put in an appearance. Well, I'd better own up right now and say that the Langsett household's interaction with The Most Watched Sporting Event in the World was pretty tangential, but enjoyable nonetheless. It went like this:

Thursday 3rd July
"We should go and see the Grand Depart!" said Mrs L, surprisingly. Mrs L does have a bike. It is a Raleigh Pioneer, from the heartbreaking period in Raleigh's history where they had learned to build bikes that were absolutely bulletproof, but sales declined nevertheless. It is The Bike That Will Not Die. For five years, my mum didn't ride it. And during all the time that she didn't ride it, it stood in the back yard of mum and dad's house getting snowed on, baked in the sun, refrigerated, blown over and drenched in rain. I borrowed it for Mrs L to have a go on. It needed a wipe down and some new tyres in order to be ready for the road again. It basically looks like new. Unfortunately Mrs L shows no more respect for the Pioneer's fierce will to survive than my mum did, and it is enjoying a comfortable semi-retirement in the shed outside. So I was, as I say, a bit surprised that she wanted to go and have a look at the Tour, which I imagined would be a bit like being hit around the head with a bicycle while someone bellows the Marseillaise at you, if you don't like cycling. Still, I jumped on Destination Yorkshire's website to have a look at how we might manage it. I wanted to see the peloton climb Holme Moss, the bleak and beautiful Pennine pass between Woodhead and Holmfirth. I had a bit of a moment, and couldn't work out a way to get up to the summit - all the roads seemed to be closed for miles on either side of the route. I thought about trying to explain to my daughters why we were hiking through the Pennines to the top of a windy hill to watch a race pass, when the passing would be over and done with in a few minutes at most. I imagined it raining while I was doing this. I wrote it off.

Saturday 5th July
I honoured the Tour by getting up early and sneaking out of the house for an early morning ride. It had been raining, so I needed mudguards but I was (naturally) feeling all roady, so I took the Sludgy Green Bike rather than the Inferno. The Sludgy Green Bike is a relatively recent arrival in the Langsett bike cave, and it is another Viscount. However, it occupied a less illustrious position in the catalogue than the mighty Aerospace Pro when it was new, and mine is a bit dog eared and tired. In addition it is, as the name suggests, a sludgy green colour. And as you can see, it has all been co-ordinated pretty thoroughly to create a slightly camouflaged effect:

In the right conditions, the Sludgy Green Bike can actually disappear entirely, merging seemlessly with the greenery behind it.

It was a great little ride - out past the paper mill at Carrington with its weird freshly braked bread mixed with sweaty socks smell, up the hill after Oughtrington (with the gradient issuing its customary reminder that a bit more self control when it comes to late night snacks and all-Pasty lunches would be no bad thing) and then right on to the empty A56 and the long run downhill into Lymm. Through the S bend down onto Lymm Dam at a positively conservative 29mph, through Lymm village and then home.

I got back and stuck ITV's wall to wall coverage of Stage 1 on. Kate looked at me askance, while I excitedly rattled off a series of unrelated Tour facts, the closest I could come to actual conversation.

" Look, there's Ned Boulting!" I said excitedly, bouncing up and down a bit. I read Ned's book about the Tour de France earlier this year and it was nice to see him doing his day job.

"Daddy, why do you like bike races so much..." said Kate in a pitying tone of voice.

We were in and out for the rest of the day, so I caught bits of the coverage. I heard about how the stage ended, but I didn't see it.

Sunday 6th July

The Bike that Will Not Die's former owner came over in the middle of the day to visit my uncle in hospital, and I had a secret mission to a classified location in North Yorkshire to complete later that afternoon, in connection with Mrs Langsett's new job. The Tour was impossible to avoid completely. It was on whenever the television was on. My uncle lives up the hill from Langsett, and my aunt described seeing the peloton coming down to the hill before taking on the Cote de Midhopestones when we spoke to her from the hospital. Later on, when I set off for North Yorkshire, the westbound lane of the M62 was full of cars with bikes on the roof or hanging off the back - more than I'd ever seen before - all returning from watching the Tour. Crossing over the stage route outside Huddersfield, there was a brief glimpse of blue lights and the debris that was the race's aftermath being scrupulously collected.

Checking Facebook later, it seemed that everyone in the world had managed to catch the race. Helen and Martin had made it to Holme Moss with their lads, as had Kate and Rick. The sun had shone, and this bald hilltop between Manchester and Sheffield looked thoroughly tamed, with thousands of people (accompanied by thousands of bikes) spread out along the final few hairpins to watch Blel Kadri storm the last ramp before the summit.

Monday 7th July
I got to work on my TdF television coverage backlog, watching the bits of stage 1 that I'd missed. The speed that Yorkshire whipped by at was eye opening. Familiar landmarks and places that we've been meaning to visit for years tripped by in turn as the peloton rolled onwards, until it felt like there wasn't a bit of the county that I'd seen where the TdF hadn't also swooped past. There was that side road on the way to Malham where Mrs Langsett demanded a comfort break, only to be surprised by a farmer on his tractor! There was the bit on the Harrogate road where, in the minibus on the way back from Kate and Rick's wedding, I'd realised that getting stuck into the chocolate fountain was going to have toilet consequences! And then there was that stage finish....


I haven't watched that much cycle racing. So the way in which the peloton sorted and distilled itself as the last few kilometres wound down was like a magic trick done in plain sight. One minute, there was a huge, chaotic, multicoloured group of riders rolling along in a way that looked almost relaxed. The next minute, the speed was up, and the group had separated into neat little lines formed of the riders of each team, each working to move their sprinter into the best position.  Mark Cavendish's Omega Pharma-Quick Step team in their black and white jerseys came hammering down the right hand side; Cavendish was tucked away third from the front. I instinctively wanted to duck out of the way. The Katusha team jinked and swerved to the left, trying to find a way through but had nothing. They were coming up on the last kilometre. I knew what would happen next. Those first two Omega Pharma riders would fall away. Cavendish would engage warp drive, treating the whole peloton like his own personal launch pad. The background would blur. The Manx lad would scream across the line and punch the air. Except nobody had told Cancellara that: he put the hammer down over on the other side of the road, racing ahead of the pack so fast he looked like he was leaving his bike behind. Omoega Pharma's hold on the front broke. I lost Cavendish and only saw him again when the crash happened, Simon Gerrans' bike going under his front wheel. Mark of course, was trying to find a gap to get himself back to the front.

Here's the thing: I knew the end result before I sat down to watch. But it was still the most exciting bit of televised sport I've ever watched. It was just incredible watching the peloton form up for the sprint, and just as incredible seeing it suddenly come unstuck.

Like I said - tangential, but enjoyable.