Beautiful Day in the Dales

So today dawned beautiful - about time too.  Clear blue skies, no wind, but freezing cold!  Lucky as we were having a family mountain bike lesson with Jill Eccleston of Run Bike Fun.  During December I did a couple of 1 on 1 classes with her to try to get over my fear of mountain biking, caused mainly by our attempts a couple of years ago at Gisburn which went a bit wrong.  I wanted to get to the point where we, as a family would be confident enough to try out some tracks again.  Happily it coincided with Christmas so I bought Matt and Tom a family mountain biking lesson to get us all on track.

As usual we had a lot of huffing and puffing getting the bike rack on the back of the car, Matt managed to skin most of his knuckles and got oil everywhere, then when we arrived he discovered that none of his gears were working.  Luckily he got them unstuck just in time.

The viaduct

Pen-y-Ghent from Blea Moor

We met at Giggleswick school where there is a mountain bike course and she took us on a circuit of the track - explaining mainly to Tom how to do it (shifting weight / leaning etc etc).  He did bits again and again to build confidence and then she got us to do a circuit by ourselves.  Wow!  Tom was brill, Matt of course did it no worries, but he said at the end how much he enjoyed it and how it was more challenging than he thought and I was very happy to (just about) keep up with them - although I still haven't been able to do it without putting my feet down.  We came away pretty confident that we can tackle the local mountain bike tracks now, just need to not leave it a year before we get back on our bikes.



As it was such a glorious day, we decided to head straight home, have showers (we were quite muddy) and then wrapped up warm again to head to Ribblehead to do our little walk around.  The sun was going down, so everything was doused in golden light.  It looked gorgeous, and there was little wind, so it really was very pleasant.

The Iceman

We ended up at the pub as it has been refurbed recently and we wanted to try it out - it was a bit poncey before which was odd considering where it was - it is a walker's pub and needs to provide service to walkers not fine dining.  Anyway, the place was completely different - the bar had moved and there were more tables and no fine dining.  Hurray, Matt said the service was great too which was an improvement as they had always been snobby in the past.

Then back home to beef rib stew from the Christmas joint.  A successful day.