Down by the Riverside

First of all, just a quick update on Thursday's shenanigans - after my epic journey into work, I did ride home again after all, even though it was uphill.  To be fair, I did have a small disagreement with some street furniture (it's debatable who won - I'm still alive, on the one hand; I have a big green bruise, quite literally on the other hand) and we had to stop for a sit down in Newington Green because I was so tired, but we did make it all the way back.  I slept well that night.

Yesterday we went on an adventure.  It was decided that we needed to go on a longish ride, but although I'm now reasonably confident (and competent) on the roads, just riding round the 'hood for hours on end is really quite dull, as is cycling endless laps of the park.  As previously mentioned, we've been on a couple of forays up and down Parkland Walk, and although we love it, it simply isn't long enough any more. The solution: a trip to Lea Valley Park.

I had a bit of a dig about online and found that the lovely people at Sustrans have mapped a route from Finsbury Park to Lea Valley Park avoiding main roads.  We set out along their route in the hot midday sun (I don't think I'm a mad dog, but James is an Englishman).  It takes a pretty direct line through the district of Stamford Hill, which some people may recognise as the home of one of the most observant communities of Orthodox Jewish people in the country - believe it or not, this is extremely relevant.

It being a Saturday, the time when we were cycling through Stamford Hill was the same time that most of the synagogues in the area had finished their morning services.  This, coupled with the fact that it was the Jewish sabbath, meant two things.  The first was that there were barely any cars on the road, as these particular Jews take the "no work on the sabbath" thing very seriously and won't drive on a Saturday (or, presumably, a Friday night).  This was a good thing.  The second was that because no-one drives on the sabbath and everyone walks home from synagogue (using the opportunity to catch up with friends on the way), no-one expects there to be any traffic on the road, so they all walk down the middle of it.  This was a bad thing.  However, it did provide me with an excellent opportunity to practise using my bell (and when people didn't get out of the way, to practise shouting very loudly), and to practise going extremely slowly without stopping.

Just before we got to Lea Valley Park, we had to go down an extremely steep road, which isn't very wide.  Just over halfway down, there's a road that goes off to the left, and as we approached it, a driving school car pulled out of the side road and stopped in the middle of the road we were on, dithered a bit and then decided to turn up the hill.  This meant James had to stop suddenly right in front of me and I had to stop suddenly just behind him.  We were very surprised to see that there was only one person in the car, meaning, presumably, that this wonderful example of driving skill was perpetrated by a driving instructor.

When we reached our destination, I suddenly realised that I hadn't really thought through our quest.  You may recall from a previous post that I wasn't planning to ride along the canal any time soon because of my experience of being quite incompetent just at running along it (I nearly fell in while marathon training).  Lea Valley Park, rather unsurprisingly, is set along the valley through which the River Lea runs.  The river has been engineered quite a lot and now closely resembles a canal.  It has a tow path and everything.  I spent most of the time we were riding along the river absolutely petrified of falling in.  I'm not too worried about myself - I'm a strong swimmer and the river isn't exactly a torrent - I'm more worried about my poor little bike and, of course, about looking a right idiot in front of an entire rowing club and several particularly evil looking geese.

Once we got going, I calmed down a little and we started to pass through meadows and marshes that were positively bucolic for Zone 3.  We passed the Tottenham Hale retail park (thankfully without having to see it), and drew alongside Ikea Edmonton (which we could see, but only at a distance), where a family were having what looked like a lovely picnic party on the banks of the river - the children were paddling, the adults were swimming and the dogs had found a fantastic stick to play with.  At this point, called Chalk Bridge, it's necessary to cross to the other side of the river over a hump-backed bridge.  I set off up the bridge approach, anticipating further idyllic pastoral scenes on the other side.  I looked over to my left and saw row upon row of, well, buses.  There was a bus depot squeezed in between the river and a reservoir on the other side of it.  Now, I'm sure from my research on the internet that Lea Valley Park has far more to offer if one keeps the faith past this little blot on the landscape, but in the extreme heat and without having eaten lunch, we decided it was time to head back.

On the return journey we stopped at Pistachios in the Park, a lovely cafe nestled in Markfield Park, to get some lunch.  It wasn't until I was mapping our journey when we got home that I discovered that we had eaten just feet away from a beam engine, which has a museum - if we'd known, we would have had a look, so there's something on our list for next time we go that way.  The rest of the journey home was largely uneventful, but we were both feeling a bit out of it by the time we got back to Finsbury Park, so we stopped for another drink before finding our way home.

It turns out our trip was 11.27 miles, which is just over one fifth of the distance from London to Brighton.  I finally feel like I have a fighting chance of getting there!

If you'd like to sponsor me for the rest of the way, please click on the donations link on the right hand side of the page.