Bass Talk [edit: now at Bass Chat] is the replacement for the old bassworld.co.uk site. It sounds like the person who ran the old site had an acrimonious split with the rest of the team, so the other guys migrated the database over to a new domain. The name is bound to piss off the people over Talk Bass, but hey, you can’t please everyone.

National Cycle Route 11, specifically, which runs from Harlow to Cambridge. Frankly there isn’t much decent online coverage of the routes, but here’s Sustrans’ page on the East of England. (Sustrans’ server appears to be powered by potatoes, just try using their mapping page.) On Saturday Kyla and I cycled from Bishop’s Stortford back to Cambridge, a pleasant 35 miles that I felt sure was further whilst in transit. Discussions of cycling to Cornwall are becoming distressingly regular in our house, it seems that spring madness has infected us both; if that goes on long enough stubbornness will take over, and then that’s it: we’re fucking going.

My legs shake in fear.  I’ve speculatively added a Cycling category to the blog, but hopefully this won’t result in the blog becoming dominated by tales of chaffed body parts and bike grease.

Kyla and I went for another bike ride on Saturday. We’d read in the February issue of Beer (CAMRA’s monthly paper) about a 30 mile loop that around a few Hertfordshire and Essex villages that starts from Royston, so we thought we’d go for that. Beer recommended taking the train to the start, but because we’re a big gung-ho, we thought we’d cycle there instead, adding a journey of about 20 miles onto our day.

We cycled to Great Chishill from Cambridge following this route, which was only really of note because we finally got to cycle along the stripy cycle lane that runs alongside the train tracks south of town. After lunch at the Pheasant we headed off around the suggested route; from Great Chishill we went to Arkesden, though we skipped the Axe & Compasses (too soon after lunch), passed Clavering and the Fox and Hounds. We meant to stop in Brent Pelham at the Black Horse, but cocked up and ended up heading onward to Great Hormead and the Three Tuns. Which turned out to shut at 3pm, so we moved on again but only as far as Hare Street and the Beehive, which is the location used to film the scene where Arthur and Ford grab a lunchtime pint before the destruction of Earth in the recent Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film. The place looked like it had recently had the interior stripped and replaced; I guess the film payed well. At this point there was talk of doing more cycling, perhaps even taking a week off and cycling to my Dad’s place in Cornwall in the summer. However, the final ten miles to Royston train station proved leg-buggeringly tortuous. I’m going to request that the next iteration of Google Maps puts the contour lines on, because there’s a surprisingly large hill just east of Royston that proved our undoing.

Out of a possible seven pubs we only actually stopped at two, so I think this is a route we’re going to have to come back and do properly sometime.