Pre-Valentine's ride

It was a fairly pleasant surprise to me to find conditions for cycling were pretty fair on Monday - dry, little wind and no sign of any ice, thank goodness. A fair turnout of 8 - Jack, Les, Drew, John L, Mike, Iain W, Bob and myself, the latter two having just returned from long trips Down Under - Bob got back from NZ on Thursday - 3 days before me.

Finzean was mentioned as a possible destination, but this was too far for me, coming just 19 hours after my journey home, so a compromise of Torphins was agreed in the end. Les, Jack, Bob and I went the conventional route, but, when we got past Glassel, Mike, who dislikes the bumpy road up the hill towards the gate at Easter Beltie, led the others round past Craiglash, adding another 1 km or so to their route.

We had already phoned ahead so we knew the scones had all been sold at Platform 22, but the advance group of 4 made sure they had first dibs at the excellent ginger cake:

It wasn't long before the others arrived, and after we'd all finished our various nibbles, Mike took the team photo:

This was ride number 19 in this year's database. Yesterday was very much an atypical day - the average attendance so far on each ride is 8 and the average trip is 31 kms.

We started this year with a total of 37 names carried forward from last year's database and added one more anticiipated new boy - Andy Conway, but he, plus 8 others have yet to make an appearance this year:

Cook	Archie
Corbett	Dan
Grant	Gary
Greenwood	Justin
Kilgour	Colin
Lodge	Malcolm
Meres	John
Tyrie	Jeb

A few of these look like they won't be back, but I won't remove their names from the database yet - I'll wait until the end of March and re-assess then.