Day 7, to Corsham

What a lovely B&B last night, a really lovely welcome from Tina Tucker who made me (and my bicycle) so happy and welcome. And such delicious porridge this morning! And it was happy that I set off, in the warm sunshine, in the direction of Wells.

It was a nice fast road, so it didn’t take long to get there (although we did get lost for a little bit, perhaps as a punishment for not checking the Garmin enough). Soon enough though, we were directed to do some more steep hills and on narrow lanes – and I was having some seriously rebellious thoughts when we encountered a nice fast B-road to Midsomer Norton. What a relief. I don’t think I really care how many lorries there are now, or tractors with wide trailers, just as long as there aren’t too many spiky hills.

Reaching Midsomer Norton there was a nice surprise – we were directed onto several miles of green way, on which we stopped for a picnic lunch before tackling another enormous hill. Paul told me that it is the longest in Britain – but he says that every time (and we seem to have had quite a lot of them today). We also passed a tiny kiosk outside a farm which was selling homemade ice-cream.

After the next (huge) hill we had another nice surprise, a descent down to a working water mill. The descent was very steep though, and I could barely hold onto the brakes.

After a day riding up and down enormous slopes for what seemed like 100 miles, we spent ages (and several miles before we accidentally stumble across it) trying to find the B&B – and it turned out that I had the wrong postcode. It’s mistakes like this which mean that the requested stats (below) each day are best-case only. Until I actually check my Garmin the distance that we actually travelled is anyones guess – these are merely planned distances.

Stats

36.5 miles (223.75 miles total), 2,000ft ascent, 1,750ft descent