A CAUTIONARY TALE.....

COUNTRY LANES

Here is a little tale that had me in fits of laughter when I first heard it.

A couple of weeks ago JD and I had planned on going for a fifty mile ride over the Purbeck hills on the Monday morning.
On the appointed day I woke up to really wet and gloomy conditions and it became obvious that the planned ride was probably going to be doomed.....

The phone rang early and it was JD , "What do you think" he said.  I told him that our best bet was to wait a couple of hours and see if there was any improvement.
Two hours later my phone rang again and JD said  "it's now even worse". And it was....

Since our earlier conversation the weather had deteriorated even further and we made the decision not to bother and I resigned myself to a session on the turbo.

Well....a few days later JD told me that a couple of hours after our second call he had got so frustrated having a day off work and not being able to get out for a decent ride, that he decided that he would brave the terrible weather and go out anyway.
He decided to use his touring bike because it has fenders and would help to minimize some of the muck that would obviously be thrown up off the road on such an awful day.
Now as he was setting out much later than he had originally intended getting out with me on the bike, he decided not to head to the Purbecks but to save time by using one of our summer loops north/west of where he lives. The route in question is mainly along country lanes.

FARMYARD

TRACTOR

These country lanes pass by lots of farms and one of the reasons we normally only use this loop during the summer months is because during the winter the lanes can become covered in mud and muck from the farm traffic....tractors to you and I.
Anyway because JD only had a few hours of daylight left he decided to throw caution to the wind and use our summer loop because it was closer to home.....

Oh dear!
Have you ever made a decision and afterwards wished you hadn't?
Well JD has!

Apparently about ten miles into the ride he realized that somehow he had taken a wrong turn and was lost.....not only that, he was soaking wet and also freezing cold.
JD was thinking to himself what a mistake it had been to decide to go out for a ride....after all he could have been nice and warm back at home...things couldn't really be any worse.....or so he thought.

So what happened next?

Still trying to find his way back on to the correct route he took a left turn just as a farmer in his tractor with muck spreader attached was pulling off his field with the muck spreader in full flow.
JD was covered  in....well....muck.
He really was covered from head to toe in slurry. Fenders didn't exactly help with this.
The thing to remember about the slurry that farmers spray over their fields, is that it is not only filthy, it also stinks and not only that it's also pretty sticky and it stuck to JD pretty much like super glue.

He did find his way home ......eventually..... and the first thing he did was to hose the bike and himself down with the garden hose. His wife wouldn't let him in the house until he had cleaned himself up and it took ages apparently to hose it all off.

So let that be a lesson to us all.....If you have a route that is designated a summer route then there is a reason we don't ride it in the winter.........