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Lon Cambria Mid Wales cycle route: Shrewsbury to Aberystwyth on NCN Route 81 with Team Glow
Officially 113 miles but we did around 120 due to discrepancies between the map, Garmin and route 81 signs.
Before we even arrived at the start, we got soaked cycling to the station. First pair of socks bit the dust, stuffing
shoes with newspaper on the train.
After an hour circling Shrewsbury’s ring road the first blue NCN Route
81 sign appeared and we're off into Shropshire. Soon we're puffing up lanes
taking us high above the Severn valley.
It’s Nic’s first trip.
- I've only done Cheshire lanes before, she says.
Liz makes a plea for undulating terrain.
- I like undulating.
Red-faced, much puffing later, we all sail down the last hill to
Welshpool for heartening vegetable soup and obligatory flapjack with coffee
(this is a Glow trip, remember) at the cycle friendly Coco coffee shop on the High
Street.
Pedalling on, the youngsters’ lithe legs turn faster than me and
Liz, so we take up the rear at our own pace, merrily clicking our gears and
when we run out of those we get off and push, clicking our cleats on Tarmac. As we pushed deeper into Wales the hills became steeper. Following the blue signs from Welshpool up a back road past Powys Castle, Garmin screaming to do a u-turn, we rode up and up, finally turning a bend and descending into Berriew (Aberriw in Welsh) and along a river path to Newtown. Despite travelling westwards towards the sea, the river flowed against our direction of travel – somewhat disconcerting.
The good thing about Sustrans routes is the tiny back roads they
take you along. The bad thing is the state of your bike when you emerge from a
river path, mud clinging to your brakes and spokes, clogging up your cleats and
hiding in great globs in your mudguards.
Rising up from the river path into Newtown, the blue signs have
grown a big H on them. Halfway up a hill
into a modern housing development we conclude that this is a cycle route to the
hospital not National Cycle route 81.
It takes another 15 minutes scrutinising the map to find our way through
this tiny town and into an industrial estate where Eureka! A blue 81 sign pops
up out of nowhere.
Suddenly, the red and pink tops of our fellow Glows also pop up, heading
our way. But hang on, it’s
the wrong way. It's 6pm and we've been on the road for 8 hours so maybe it's a
mirage.
-
Don't go that way, we met a man and he told us
it's 4 miles steep up, up, up, we'll never do it, says excitable Jen.
Met a man? we wonder
-
He said You don't know who I am, do you? And we
said no, and he said I'm Barry Hoban and I’ve started the Tour de France 12 times
and completed it 11 times so I took a picture of him. That's H-o-b-a-n, said
Jen.
-
My gears are slipping said Becky.
Unsure whether Barry the legend's faith faltered because we were female
or because of our bikes, we decided to be on the safe side. We bombed it the last 12 miles to
Llanidloes on the flat main road with traffic zooming past. Very un-Sustrans-ish. Total at the half-way stage: 68 miles, should
have been 58. A tidy 3,618 ft of climbing, max speed 33 mph.
That night I screwed back my cleat that had worked loose during
the day.
Day 2 - by concentrating very hard we went the right way out of
Llanidloes (historic home of the Welsh weaving trade), and immediately started
climbing away from the River Severn.
Becky with her clicky gears had decided not to come. Up and up, me and Liz in our traditional
position at the back out of sight of the others, playing cat and mouse with a
red Royal Mail van delivering to houses and farms on our route.
We're on the road to Rhayader and the Elan Valley, with not much
in between. Good old Sustrans takes us
on a gated road to the right of the River Wye, and we can see heavy traffic on
the main A470 the other side of the valley.
Red kites circle thirty feet above our heads, and little ickle lambs on
rickety legs snuggle up to their mothers. Liz takes a lovely lamb photo while the
ewe glares at her. I've been stared at
by so many sheep on this trip; I could start to get a complex. The wildlife is doing us a treat, and the landscape is backing up the feel-good element: blue rippling water, lush emerald fields, pine green wooded valley-side, and then the sun comes out and showers the whole lot in a sparkling light. All of a sudden the road flattens out and we're bowling along side by side on the undulating route and we're on our way to heaven.
Rhayader is a blip. We brush by the outskirts to follow a canal path to the Elan Valley trail. It's well laid out and we breeze past pedestrians, heading for the Elan Valley visitor centre, and boom! Round a bend the thousand-foot dam streaming with water fills the eyeballs. A wall of water ahead.
Our mates are there with sandwiches and cake
- We just got here 5 minutes ago.
We set off again after food, photos and discussing whether there
were thousands or billions of gallons in the reservoir. Within 10 minutes Emily got her hands dirty
sorting out Nic’s puncture. 
We're in one of the officially wettest places in the UK, on a
gloriously sunny Easter Saturday, barrelling past cyclists of all types and
ages. The trail alongside the water is cycling paradise: the orange, green and
brown of the surrounding hills contrasting against the deep blue-grey of the
water. Once there were two villages down
there until the Victorian burghers of Birmingham decided that this Welsh water
was jolly nice and deserved to be drunk by their city's residents.
Rounding a bend at the end of the lake I click across into my
granny ring for the sudden climb. Crunch, crrrrrunnnch.
-
Chain off! I'll catch you up in a minute
I tug at it. Nothing. Bit jammed. Unhook my panniers, turn bike
upside down. Tug again. No result. Liz freewheels back round the hairpin bend
towards me. I show her the problem. She
yanks. Nothing. Yanks again. Yes! that bit is freed. Just that bit now, and
that bit behind the large cog, and that bit right down there. She pulls, I brace by pushing on the pedal.
Nothing. Repeatedly no joy.
Traffic is streaming past, I feel pathetic. Why doesn't a Hulk-like character loom up behind us and solve our problem?
We examine our tools. Can't get enough purchase or leverage using
the multi-tool. We can’t
release the chain connector link and I break the chain tool trying to force out
a rivet, so we try to break the chain. Can't. We're stuck, miles from anywhere, no mobile
phone signal. We can't walk the remaining 30 miles to Aberystwyth. Liz rejects the adjustable spanner but the
14mm spanner is thin. I wedge it between the sprocket and chain ring to create
a space and humph!! her oomph frees a section of chain. Again! Shove, wedge,
bend, pull - it's out! Can't believe we've done it. I'm all shaky, my hands are
filthy, I'm dying for a wee, and it's 3.30 pm and we're not even halfway. But fate is on our side and after an hour of
mechanical struggle we're back on the switchback, pulling easily up the hill
into dramatic Welsh mountain scenery.
At the top, gaping at the vista behind, in front and around us, we
know we're going to make it along the undulating road. Some of the undulations
are heavy duty, but we keep our spirits up by glorying in the colours, the
mountain scenery, the feeling of This is my world and I belong in it.
The next wrong turning on a forest road is nothing we can't cope with, and - lo and behold! We encounter our mates in the hippy village of Cwmystwyth. They've been all over the place, finally found themselves back here on the route. We cram crisps and haribo sweets into our mouths and a shopkeeper with green hair fills our water bottles, saying that today's splendid yet uncharacteristic weather featured on today’s news. The cleat on my right shoe is wiggling like a loose tooth but I ignore it.
It's not exactly downhill from here: there's more mud and forest
and missing signs and we're all furious at a blue sign pointing uphill onto a narrow
muddy forest. Push, push, grump, grump for half a
mile. A horse rider says You should have stayed on the main road. Yeah,
thanks.
We join a dank, overgrown ancient
railway line for a pleasant flat ride, plummet down a road, then re-join the
railway line before finally returning to the bliss of Tarmac.
It's 7.15 and we're heading towards the low blazing ball of the
setting sun. As Aberystwyth is on the West
coast of Wales we're going in the right direction but when on earth are we
actually going to see the sea?
-
Sod it, let's just get there on the main road.
We pause to gather our energy for the final push, downing gels
and mouthfuls of sweets.
-
Oh no, not more hills, said Nic. The gods smiled on her as eagle-eyed Jen spotted a blue 81 sign leading through a housing estate to another old railway line - Tarmac this time. We loved ourselves and our bikes and each other and Wales and the whole world.
The sea finally materialised at the end of a dyke, and Aberystwyth's funicular railway rose in the distance at the other end of the bay.
Through the town and arriving at the pier, my Garmin went mad -
dingdingadingdingding - announcing we'd reached the end of the route. We hugged
each other in the gloaming, starving, filthy and dying to get to our
accommodation. We'd done it. No probs. 57 miles.
Max speed today 31 mph. 4038ft of climbing. We were out there from 9.30am to nearly 8pm, arriving at sundown. 125 miles altogether.
Definitely recommended.
PS Next day – I’d lost a cleat screw and my shoe got stuck to the pedal, so I finished the adventure wheeling my bike through the station hop-along style, one-shoe-one-sock mode. Who cares?
