Trav's Travels: Mountain Biking in Bristol

9/12/15

With my new bike, the weekend, and nice weather, I decided to head out for a mtn bike ride. There are 3 trails within a 10-15 minute ride from my place, which is cool. And 2 of them I reached by riding completely on bike paths to get there. The first one I went to, called Nova trail, sits on a giant estate called Ashton Court Estate. The estate is everything you'd imagine in a wealthy British estate: it has a mansion, large fields full of deer for hunting, forests, gardens, and a golf course. It's open to the people of Bristol to use all the trails, including hiking, biking, and mt biking. The trail was fun and very much man-made like the trails at ski areas, so it was very flowy and had little jumps and banks built into it.

I then headed over to Timberland Trail which is on forest service land. This trail had more of a wilderness feel and ended at a small pond called Abbot's pond that monks used to use to catch fish as they journeyed through the countryside. In the area of this trail, I found miles and miles of other trails, which I explored. In the forest area and then between farms, they have public walking paths and public bridle paths that are singletrack that you can ride. Unlike back home where horse trails aren't good for biking, here they are fine b/c the soil is different.

The third trail I hit was the Yer Tiz in Leigh woods which is a National Trust Forest. It was quite similar to the trail at Ashton Court.

I had originally thought I'd be doing about 20 miles with the 3 trails, but after finding all those other trails I stayed out all day and biked many more miles. All the trails were lined with blackberries, which of course made for a delicious ride!

In the evening I headed out to North Street, which is the happening street just 3 blocks from my street. They were having a beer festival with live music, so I stopped by for a bit. On the way home, I passed by a street party. The neighborhood had closed the street to have a bbq and a fire right in the middle of the street. They were all sitting around the fire, campfire style, and roasting marshmellows

9/13/15

Today I mainly worked on my project, but I took a ride in the afternoon and discovered a couple more single tracks around Leigh woods. Also biked out towards Pill on a nice little bike path. There are just miles and miles of paved and dirt cycle paths around here that mom and dad would just love. Bristol is known as the green city of the UK b/c of all it's bike and walking paths. But if you have to be off the bike paths it feels kinda of sketchy to me b/c the roads are so narrow, curvy, so many strange turns, and all those roundabouts. The cyclists here are crazy aggressive and would certainly get honked at, flipped off, or even hit back home. But this is a bike friendly city, so the drivers don't seem to get too upset. Some of the big roundabouts are too busy and confusing for me (given the whole they drive on the left side of the road thing), so for those I usually dismount from my bike and use the pedestrian crosswalks to get through them

9/14/15

Got to experience typical bristol weather for the first time. It rained all day. I'm fairly prepared for the rain in that I have a rain coat, rain shorts (in FL you cut off the your rain pants to make them rain shorts since you're always wearing shorts and if you wore rain pants you'd get wetter from sweat than from the rain), and a rain cover for my pants. But unlike in FL, I'm wearing shoes not sandals, so the shoes get pretty wet. I don't know what the bike commuters here do about that other than probably have a dry pair they store at work. There's a somewhat long and sustained steep hill from the river up to the university. I'd say about twice as long as the road from High Drive up to my parents' house and similar steepness (or for those in GNV, 3 times the length and same pitch as the steepest road that comes up from the hospital and ends at campus police/biology). Everyone here complains about how steep the hill is and won't even walk 1/2 way down in during lunch to where they say the best lunch spots are. They also told me to not be embarrassed to walk up it with my bike b/c most people do. But in the end it's not really that bad, just a good hill to get the heart pumping and warm up in the rain. It's funny people's different perceptions of hilly depending on where you live.

9/16
Today at lunch was a Memmott lab celebration as one of her lab students finished and passed her "viva" which is the last oral examination that students in the UK have to pass to become a PhD student. So there was fancy food and even champagne for lunch. Jane's lab has 14 girls and 1 guy (poor Alfredo). I told him Alfred, you are lucky to be working around so many ladies, and he said in his Chilean accent "No, not at all. Have you ever even worked with 2 girls in lab together?"