INparvo

1409216 Hoy Bike 

Helen Pidd's Colour Supplement review of the Hoy Sa Colabra .001 2014 road bike had a 51 inch frame. In my day we would have said, She must have legs right up to her wotsit. Read 51cm and it may be OK.

Well, this took me on two trips.

One was to rush to the icy garage to look through my pre-digital picture files i.e. prints. I remember the day we drove the snaky route to the bay and strolled through the towering cliffs to have our sandwiches on the strand.

These were the cliffs of youth, the gorge where bandits lay in wait, where in the Western the leading lady showed her femininity with a giggle,  stepping on stones to avoid the water.

But there was an atmosphere beyond this.

Two cats humped. 

 A few more were idling around, a little angrily, we thought.

Like kids too late to bed. They seemed to get worse. Two in particular, in retrospect, I imagined saying,

These are my suckers,

no, mine!

Not!

Are!

Are NOT, You had first choice yester / argghhhhhh, .

We opened our sandwiches a little warily. They circled. Then we noticed that they were starting to spiral inwards. We munched, watching them. Suddenly a sand witch (they were mostly female) snatched the end of my bread from my hand and rushed off.

I threw the remnant into the crowd. They dived.

After that we sat in love-seat fashion to watch them.

We made plans.

Suddenly we jumped up, threw our banana skins in the air like winners hats, and beat it to the car.

I could not find the photo I thought I'd taken, then realised it was probably a bought postcard taken with old fashioned aerial photography.

My better pix were probably in a box marked UNIQUE. I couldn't find the box.

Google Earth followed by Google Street seemed to confirmed this.

It would have been much easier and certainly more fun free-wheeling from top to bottom, remembering to let off the brakes from time to time so our rims could cool. Google Street slip-sliding, slip-slicing jerkily down just showed patches of grey and orange rock and slices of maritime pine over and over in differing angular an organic patterns.

As it happened it was gloriously Sunny Sunday. I started to type this while food went down and B prepared the bikes for what was to be a nearly 40 mile ride. To avoid punctures* and floods we used mostly better B roads rather than flinty, thorny lanes. I was using a single freewheel so it was a test on the hillier bits. But 100x better than  3 hours on a turbo at the gym.

*

Later that day a friend, Ted (also runner/cyclist) assured me farmers can pay a little extra for shield that stops the thorns spreading.