Beautiful Bike Ride!

Best Biking Buddies!

Millennium Bridge on the National Trans Pennine Cycling Trail

 This Sabbath we finally had some decent weather.  I still wouldn't go so far as to call it 'summer weather', but I think it might have hit 70 degrees, and it was only partly cloudy instead of full cloud coverage and/or rain.  So we busted out our bikes to do a ride we had been wanting to do for quite some time.  

York Races

Race Track Grand Stand

We headed out, down the river, and onto the National Trans Pennine Cycling Trail (named after, I assume, the Pennine Mountains.  According to wikipedia they are "a low-rising mountain range, separating the North West of England from Yorkshire and the North East").  This ran into the Millennium Bridge, which coincidentally was part of the route I ran during my recent 10 K.  

The trail then turned off towards the (horse) race track.  The trail continues actually right through the race track.  It was the evening of the last day of the biggest races of the year in York, and luckily enough we were there just in time to see up close and personal the end of the last race!  It was pretty cool to see them take off from the starting gate, and then after the field was cleared we were allowed through the track and on our merry way.  After we traveled on the trail for a while, we saw a little path leading into some woods and naturally had to take it.  We entered the quaint little Knavesmire Woods (see this wiki article for more on the history of Knavesmire).  It was a small but lovely little woods where we did some self-timer photo action.   We came out of the woods in an unknown neighborhood, but soon found a recognizable main road again.  However, we were quickly distracted once again when we came to the entrance to Hob Moor, which was something interesting I had seen on the trail map but we hadn't planned to get to.  Of course we had to ride through it, just to say we had ridden in a moor.  For those of you wondering as I was, according to dictionary.com, a moor is "a tract of open, peaty, wasteland, often overgrown with heath, common in high latitudes and altitudes where drainage is poor; heath."  So there you go.  It was pretty cool!  It was mostly rough, tiny little trails, although we did see some tracks that looked like cart tracks.  According to the sign, some of the trails date back to the Roman times!  The sign also pointed out that there is a stone there which dates back to the time of the plague, where locals used to leave food and water for those with the disease to come and collect them without infecting others.  Awesome :)  

We ended up coming out of the moor a little ways back from where we entered it, and soon passed the race course again, this time from the other side.   The races had officially ended at this point, and hoards of people were leaving the track.  The races are an awesome opportunity for some great people watching, as the English still really like to dress up for them (think Pretty Woman and My Fair Lady).  Not only are people really dressed up, the woman use the races as their 'pull out your crazy hat day'.  There were some crazy head attire to be seen, let me tell you.  Really huge ones, ones with the nets across their faces, feather sticking out everywhere, you name it.  Car and people traffic was insane, but we finally made it back from our 8.5 mile trek safe and sound!   

PS- As you can see, I've decided to try experimenting with using links more...  So for more information on some of the things in this post, click on the highlighted words.   

 

Knavesmire Woods