Grow Your Own Dog.....

The jazz festival that I mentioned in my last post took place at Upton on Severn.
In lots of ways the town is almost a step back to the 1950s.
The high street has lots of small independent shops with no multi nationals that we could see.

There are a number of pubs in the town and during the jazz festival they all seemed to host various bands. We went back again earlier this week to have a better look around.

One of the things that really captured our attention was the large dog near the tourist information office...
It looks like a large Old English Sheepdog but it is in fact a plant of some kind.....

It could well catch on...

No need to go to the breeding kennels for your next dog just grow your own.......

Below is a photo of the local garage...usually this style of building would have been modernised but thankfully this one is original and has been maintained like that....

 Here is the high street...... This too hasn't changed much over the years.

 View of the Severn from the pub garden where we had lunch.....

 Finally a picture of the town museum....

Malvern....Still No Awning...

Last Monday we moved on from our site at Cropredy and are now at the Blackmore CCC site close to the Malvern hills.
We have stayed here before but that was about ten years ago and on that visit we were camping in a tent.

Having received a replacement air tube for our awning we were planning on putting the awning up on our arrival here.
We got the awning out of it's bag and unboxed the new tube but after attempting to insert the tube in the outer zipped pole tube it became obvious that we had been sent the wrong tube.....

So we are still using the canopy and windscreen (wind break) set up that we have been using since our stay at Salisbury.

A quick call to Cameron at Automotive Leisure and Cameron admitted it was his fault...
He said that he had been sent the complete set and had obviously sent the front arch out to us instead of the rear as we had requested.

Unfortunately there are issues with the CCC receiving parcels on behalf of campers so we will have to wait till we get to our next site in a couple of weeks time and get it sent there....
Still with the hot weather we have had this past week the canopy has probably been a better set up than an awning anyway..... 

Current set up...great in hot weather..

 Since we have been here I've been to a Jazz Festival  at Upton on Severn as well as getting out on the bike in an area that I've not cycled in before and we have also been out walking some of the many footpaths that there are surrounding the campsite....

This coming week we are planning a trip to Worcester which is a place that neither of us have ever been to before.

View of part of the Malvern hills on today's walk.

This past weekend the site has been rammed with a lot of people trying to take advantage of the good weather with a weekend camping trip.

Apparently 77 units packed up and left the site at lunchtime today. Mind you as they were leaving more units were arriving although not quite as many as had left......

Tomorrow I am planning a cycle ride down towards Gloucester so I am now going to head off to bed for a good nights sleep in preparation for the cycling effort...

Banbury or Eccles....

Wherever you travel to in the UK you can usually find somewhere that will sell you an Eccles cake....
I don't dislike Eccles cakes but I have always had a preference for Banbury cakes...

It must be said that they are very similar.
They are both made from a flaky pastry with a spiced fruit filling although the Banbury cakes are more oval in shape whereas the Eccles are round and deeper.

But I feel that it is in the eating where there is the biggest difference....
The Banbury cakes to my mind have a more spicy and nicer texture in the mouth.

I have always liked them but over the years they seem to be more and more difficult to find in the shops as I said most places will sell Eccles cakes but very rarely will they have Banbury cakes.

A lot of the people working in cake shops don't even seem to know what they are.

As our current location is only a few miles away from Banbury I was able to find some for sale but even Tesco in Banbury stocks Eccles cakes but not the nicer Banbury cakes...Shame on you Tesco. !!!

I found my beloved Banburys in a shop selling sweets and a few types of cakes but I just don't understand why they are so difficult to obtain...after all they have been made in the region to secret recipes since 1586...
Maybe that's the reason....the recipe is so secret that not enough people know how to make them.....

Aviation Interference and a New Location....

We have moved on from the Salisbury site and are now at a private site in North Oxfordshire close to the border with Warwickshire.
It is a very nice site that seems to be a mix of residential and touring pitches very similar to the site in Devon where we spent last winter....

All the grass around the site is neatly cut and the hedges are well trimmed. The toilets and showers are clean and tidy and there is a small information room with lots of ideas for places to visit.
There is also a well equipped laundry room.

All in all the site has everything that we look for in a site and best of all it is cheaper than a site operated by either of the two UK clubs...

We are less than a mile from the village of Cropredy where Fairport Convention hold their annual music festival.
Unfortunately that takes place in early August so we will miss that event.

Intrestingly we only heard of this site during a chance conversation with another camper at the CCC Moreton site back in April....
They come here each year in order to attend the music festival.

While we were at Salisbury something happened that hadn't happened at anytime during our previous four years of touring.
When I tried to operate our motor-mover it wouldn't work properly...it just kept jerking and then turning off...

I mentioned this to Cameron at Automotive Leisure and he said that it sounded as if it was interference from something that was transmitting on a similar wavelength as our motor-mover hand control.

He suggested that when we leave the site if we were still getting the interference to try operating it with the controller held just inside the caravan door...
Apparently the steel frame of the caravan would help to shield the transmission from my hand control from the transmission from whatever was interfering with it...

So that's what we did with Anne shouting directions and me operating the mover with my arm held through the caravan door effectively driving the caravan blind.
We managed to get the caravan hitched up with this method but were happy when we got here to find that all was working again as it should.

There was an airfield not far from the Salisbury site and there was a lot of small airplane activity and it seems likely that was the source of the interference....

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........