Welwyn Here We Come
Posted on Tuesday 13 March 2007 by Ken Peters
It was almost a perfect spring day with a nice ride to Ayot St Lawrence for lunch and with very little on the sporting horizon to mar my day as Spurs are still in the FA Cup and England surprised everyone by beating France at rugby for the first time since October 2003. OK, so what spoilt things, well. I have to say it was a stiffish breeze which kept the temperature down and a puncture in the afternoon.
I was the first to arrive at Enfield Town station, to greet the 10:04 train and the riders who had come from Liverpool Street, but was soon joined by Alex McKinnell, and Mike Oliver. Eventually we numbered ten who were Geraldine Nogami, Denise Pugh, Kelvin Dane, Chris Douglas, John Snuggs, Barry Walker and Nick Wells in addition to those who had ridden to the start point. Most of the riders I had not seen for a while and in the case of Barry Walker the while had possibly stretched to years but I did remember seeing his recumbent so knew that we had been acquainted previously. John and Kelvin made up this week’s ‘usual suspects’ as they had been out with me on the previous Sunday.
The ride was a little different from my usual efforts as I generally manage to find very flat routes but to get out of Enfield when going north or west you cannot avoid climbing out of the Lea Valley as Enfield represents the western edge. The generally upward direction continued after we had got to Hadley Wood and turned north towards Potters Bar and I reckon that we hit the highest point of the day when we turned off the A1000 at the transmission station at Brookmans Park. From there we also had pretty much escaped urban sprawl but as the route skirted St Albans we did go through several villages that had become dormitories for the bigger location. In general things proceeded smoothly apart from almost losing John when he turned left instead of going straight on at a roundabout.
Lunch was at The Brocket Arms in Ayot St Lawrence and we arrived there at 12:15 as I took a short cut that knocked 3 or 4 kilometres off the planned route. I need not have done that as they did not start serving lunch until 12:30 but what is a ride without a little bit of off the cuff decision making.
After a reasonable lunch, we were reduced to 9 when Mike went his own way in order to ensure an early return, which we took in the garden the ride continued in a fairly normal fashion until I punctured just before Panshanger Aerodrome so I made that our tea stop so my repair did not delay the group too long. We were reduced further at Panshanger when Chris made his own way back and before Hertford we became 7 as Alex McKinnell took a more westerly route in order to return.
That was it apart from dropping Barry at Bayford so he could get a train back as he felt that he had done enough for the day as he has not been riding very much. I do hope that he was able to get back from there easily as I noticed soon afterwards that there were rail replacement buses going in the opposite direction from us and later discovered that the train service had stopped short of Hertford at Cuffley.
The diversions that we took reduced the ride distance to almost 80Km which is just about the minimum for a 3-star ride in good conditions.