Awning Problem & Tour Series.......

We arrived here at Salisbury c&cc site a week ago today.....
We had good dry weather for the journey here which was only about 23 miles anyway.....

We had lunch and started to put our awning up but it wasn't long before we noticed a problem...a bulge had appeared on the rear tube... Closer investigation showed that the air tube itself was intact but the webbing tube that it fitted into had failed along about a foot of  stitching....
We then had to take the awning down and put up the Isabella canopy and also the Isabella windscreen that we also recently purchased.....

We had some hot weather over the bank holiday and this combination seemed to work quite well...
I have included an image of the setup below....... It's quick to put up and just as quick to take down so as an alternative to a full awning I can recommend the combo......

On the Thursday evening we walked into Salisbury to watch the Ovo Energy Tour Series city centre cycle racing.....
I was keen to watch the Women's Brother UK Tifosi team....
As my winter/audax bike is a Tifosi I thought that it would be good to go along and support  them. The team was leading the series and I am pleased to say they also won the race here in Salisbury...
Following the women's race we watched the men's race which I have to admit was much faster than the women... Having said that I would have struggled to keep up with the women anyway.....

Isabella canopy and windscreen.

On Friday we drove back over to Wimborne for my appointment with my cardiologist.
She spelled out the current situation with my Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy and the risks I run if I take part in any form of competitive sport... This obviously includes sportives and audax events and she repeated the warning about not going over 85% of my max heart rate.
She has also arranged for me to have a treadmill test in September as well as counselling sessions prior to having a gene test....

While we were near Bournemouth we popped over to Automotive  Leisure with the awning airpole....
A new one will have to come from France and then be sent on to us at a campsite....it will be interesting to see how long that takes.....

A Week of Electrical Activity......

Yes that's what it has been ....a week of electrical activity and not all of it was welcome...

Let me start with the good activity....
Today JD and I had planned to meet up for a cycle ride but the forecast weather wise was not good...indeed as I looked out of the window just after waking up it started to rain.
A quick call to JD and we had come up with another plan...I would go over to his house and try out his E-bike.
JD has been on at me for months to give the bike a quick spin and today seemed like a good opportunity as long as we could dodge the rain......

Now JD's E-bike is not your everyday model it is a top of the range bike and it is built like a tank...The bike is so tank like that JD calls it Rommel...
You can see what it looks like in the images above. It must weigh at least double what my own touring bike does and that like most tourers could not be described as light weight.

My experience on the bike today proves that it is a fun machine....before I knew it with hardly any effort on the pedals I was up to 16.5mph and that was into a head wind and that for me is it's shortcoming.....it is too easy to ride.

I didn't need to put much effort into riding it...I didn't feel that I was exercising at all and for me that spoilt the ride...
To my mind cycling is all about the simplicity of physical effort and I felt that the simple pleasure of exercise was being stolen by the bike....

Don't get me wrong...there is a place for the E-bike for certain people with physical or medical problems that still want to get out and ride but in my cycling world it's best use would be as a pacing machine to help me train faster on hills....

The ride on JD's Rommel was the fun part of this weeks 'electrical activity'.
The not so fun part occurred on Monday evening...

Anne and I had enjoyed a very nice day with a stroll in the woods doing a spot of bird watching and not a lot else.... I was planning to ride the Felt on the Tuesday so was giving it a check over when I noticed that my heart rate had increased dramatically....
It didn't seem to be dropping back down so I put on my heart monitor and it was recording a rate of 154bpm.

This last happened in 2014 and ended up with me in a hospital operating theatre......
We waited for an hour and a half and with no reduction in bpm I ended up at A&E....

The same as last time there was no Triage for me as I was taken straight through to 'majors' as it was deemed a life threatening situation... Luckily for me as I was being attended to the rate started to fall on it's own....
Anyway they decided to keep me in overnight and the following morning I saw a cardiologist who was familiar with my condition diagnosed last year which is Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy.

The fast heart rate is a form of atrial fibrillation which is a bit like an electrical short circuit in my heart...
After an examination and ECG it was decided that I could go home....

I asked him if I could still ride my bike to which he replied "yes no problem at all".
I then asked him should I be considering an electric bike...
he said  "a bit early for that yet, an ordinary bike will be better for you so long as you don't push things to the extreme".

One thing that I can say is that riding JD's E-bike was the more fun form of electrical activity of the two.. ..

Ready to Ride.......

Here we have a view of my Felt Z1 all prepared and ready to ride.....
The photo was taken from inside my new Clairval EuroVent Twin Air Awning looking out of the main window on our current pitch view.....

The day after we arrived on site I took the Tifosi over to my daughter's house to store it until the autumn and to bring the Felt out of it's winter hibernation.
I then went down to Samways & Son the bike shop in Wimborne to have a new cassette fitted.

Great service as the part was fitted there and then while I waited....
As I was looking around the shop I noticed a bike that I know very well...
Indeed I have cycled alongside this bike for hundreds of miles including from Gibraltar to the UK...
It was my cycling buddy John Donoghue's touring bike that was in the shop for a major service including new chain...cassette... cables...mudguards and more....

One thing that I noticed that I really liked was some new Fizik bar tape that John had had fitted to his tourer...
As I know that the bar tape on my own tourer needs replacing plus the fact that Samways had this tape at a special price I just had to buy some too...
It was great to get out on the Felt again...it really is a lovely bike to ride and I know that I will have some great rides on it throughout this coming summer......
As I write this a new set of tyres for the Felt are winging their way to me for fitting early next week and that should be the final touch for my summer rides........