Looking for my mojo, but found something else...

It has been ten days since my last ride thanks to the usual ailments, plus a brand new one – Shingles! That's not a whole barrel of laughs either, and the novelty soon wears off believe me. So it's been a while, and even today, as I wheeled the old snotter Carrera out of its kennel, I wasn't feeling the buzz, but still, 'give it a go' and all that.

So the usual loop around the back lanes beckoned, but even after just those ten days I seemed to have missed out on a fair bit. Along Tregassow Lane the hedges seem to have grown rapidly and narrowed the lane dramatically. I can no longer see over the top of them either to gawp at the view. Whole crops have gone too, changing the look of the local landscape from my last trundle through, and it seems like all the wild flowers lining the verges have disappeared as well. 

Traditional farming in the foreground, diversification in the form of a solar farm in the background.

It feels more like Autumn than late summer, and the puddles and mud/gravel collected across the road at the bottoms of a couple of hills bear testament to all the rain we've had recently, but muddy gravel wasn't the only hazard I encountered.

Plenty of evidence of the recent rain still to be found on the country lanes.

I could've done with a puddle like this just a couple of miles later.

I recently mentioned successfully dodging the dog poo on a lane that is popular with dog walkers, but today, somehow, I rode straight into some. Round and round on the front wheel it went, squashed into the treads of the tyre like a well mashed Snickers bar, and boy did it whiff. I was in danger of spilling my breakfast, and typically, just when you need a decent sized puddle, there aren't any to be found. So I had to make do with scraping off what I could with a stick, and riding along the edge of the road hoping the gravel collected there would help scour it away. The rattle of a few stones flying up were proof of the adhesive qualities of this particular dog's dinner along with a big grey patch of dirt clinging to the front tyre. I didn't look at the back wheel to see how that fared, the delights of the front were enough for one day.

Thankfully the Carrera isn't a house bike like the other two, it lives in the shed, so at least there was no danger of bringing any remnants into the house, but they don't warn you of the hazards of dog doings when promoting cycling and the pros and cons to expect, a serious oversight I believe.

Not a lake in the local wood, nor a pond, just a big puddle. A common enough sight in winter here, but not in summer.

Other than that, it was an uneventful ride, and I looked, but didn't find my mojo anywhere along the way, but that's the way things are, not every ride can be a winner.