Over 40 kms!

Today I conquered Tile Hill - Birmingham - Tile Hill cycling route.

Together with my buddies, Wilson, Tony and Oliver, we cycled over 40 kms of road, pavement, and muddy canal terrains. We got rained for a few kilometers on our way to Birmingham and back to Tile Hill. The rain, however, wasn't heavy enough to soak our clothes.

A few kilometers into the canal route, my front tire got punctured. It was quite unfortunate since my bike, being a mountain bike, has the thickest tires of all the bicycles in the group. The others either have a road or a hybrid bike. However, luck was still on my side. We got off the canal and was lucky to get off a street with a few commercial establishments and residential houses around. I gathered up the courage and talked to this man sweeping his front yard. Him and his wife were initially pointing me to a Halfords shop which is more than 1 mile away. Then, luckily, their friend passed by (who was cycling!). She was a blessing from heaven as she knew a bike shop very near the area (she bought her bike in that shop). Her name was Amanda and was kind enough to take a detour to accompany us to the bike shop. In less than 30mins from the start of the puncture until my tire was fixed (for 8GBP!), we were on our way to Birmingham again which took us another 1 hour to get to the the city centre.

I struggled on our way back to Tile Hill. I got left a few times and at some point both my feet had cramps. So i had to stop to rest for a minute to stretch my feet. I was already very tired at that point and my leg joints hurt but amazingly, we were faster than when we went to Birmingham :)

Photo : Grabbed from Wilson's camera. Taken by a nice random long-haired guy in Birmingham University.