Diary - Day 26

A long, long day today covering over 100 miles by the end. Overall it was a fairly good one, but that had much more to do with the afternoon than the morning. Early on we were hit by another case of 'weather' along with a lot of struggling up and down hills. My own fault really, I set the route to go along the pennines as I thought it would be more interesting - it was to a degree but you just can't enjoy good views if rain and clouds cover them up.


This is an early view, the clouds coming in as we ground our way up onto some very high points.


And this one shows Sam churning up one of the first hills of the day. Not an easy one for sure.



We weren't up in the pennines all that long, about 20 miles, but with the rain coming down and a few nasty climbs such as the very steep road out of Stanhope we were glad to be going down towards Barnard Castle and to have the sun come out 10 minutes later was brilliant. We flew into the town, through Eggleston on the B6278 and stopped in a pub for lunch. Then it was onto Darlington and away from anything that looked like a hill. At some point in the afternoon I would have to make a decision, straight down to York through the flatlands or via the North York Moors.

The wind had been coming from the West all day and the big bank of dark cloud in front of us seemed to be a little north of the moors so we took the long way round to see what the moors were like. We stopped in Hutton Rudby for food just as the wind changed and the north wind brought the rain along with a 10 degree drop in temperature. So we were soaked as we headed towards the considerable incline that led us up onto the top, but the rain went as quickly as it had arrived and by the time we reached the top it was bright sunshine again. This part of the day turned out to be easily the best part.

This is the view looking north-east at the top of the climb onto the moors, just after Carlton-in-Cleveland:



Foolishly I neglected to take any photos after that. With the sun out there were some great views but I just didn't want to stop.

We reached Helmsley after a very easy ride through the sun-drenched moors and sat in the town eating flapjacks and enjoying what is a very pretty town-centre. The hostel in the town was tempting, but we had plenty of energy and wanted a full day off the next day so headed on towards York. We found a campsite at Strensall and stopped there, wandering down to the pub and eating crappy snackfood in place of an actual meal. It was pretty late when we arrived there, the campsite was partially flooded and ours was the only tent - mostly caravans - but everything worked out well enough.

Day 26 review

Mileage - 106
Weather - 7/10 (crap morning, great evening)
Nice beers - none
Great views - quite a few, mostly the North York Moors because we couldn't see much along the Pennines.