Saturday 16thJune 2007
Barmouth to Dolgellau
This trip was planned to take a week with short distances to cycle at either end of the week to allow for travel. I was going to do the ride with a friend - Tony Wallis - who accompanies me on many of my rides around Leicestershire and with whom I have done the C2C ride in the north. The first days ride was to be a mere 15 miles or so.
Not far to go you might think! However the first hurdle was to catch the train from Hinckley to Barmouth with a change at Birmingham on the way. The weather the day before had been terrible. The line between Leicester and Birmingham had been closed due to floods at Water Orton - a good place to have floods! To make matters worse we still hadn't received our train tickets (ordered three weeks previously) for the Birmingham to Barmouth leg of the journey, and arrangements had been made to collect them from the ticket office in Birmingham. Because of this we had already decided to catch the earlier train from Hinckley to give ourselves more time at Birmingham - but was the train running? The internet seemed to be saying that it was so off we cycled to Hinckley station to catch the 8.30am train. It eventually turned up 15 mins late and despite warnings from the ticket collector that the journey into Birmingham could well take twice as long as normal, we arrived in Birmingham with plenty of time to spare to catch the 10.30 to Barmouth.
So far so good! Had the ticket office received the appropriate paper work to allow us to obtain tickets? Yes and no! Yes they had the paperwork - but not the bit that allowed them to give us tickets at the discounted advance rate. After more phone calls and a further 15 mins delay we were given tickets - but without cycle reservation confirmation. The lady in the ticket office wrote a few words of explanation on our tickets - hopefully this would work.
The next section of the journey went nearly without hiccup. The train was made up of two sections and we discovered that it was going to split at Machynlleth - we had camped ourselves in the wrong half! We would have time to move when we got there, so why worry. Getting off at Machynlleth was difficult due to the crowds of people, but we managed and moved to the other end of the train. My bike was successfully loaded just as the doors closed. A very worried looking Tony was still on the platform. The train moved a few feet and the doors opened again - no need to worry! Well not for that reason. There was already one bike in the very restricted space allocated for bikes - two more bikes in the space was nearly an impossibility. We all had reservations and the guard was not happy. Somehow we managed to squeeze them into a space hardly big enough for two bikes.
And so to the ride. The first priority was to find a cup of tea, after that the visit to the sea front - but where was the sea! It was low tide and too much hassle to dabble the feet. We made do with taking photos of the donkeys and we were off. The first section of the ride was over the railway bridge to Fairbourne and from there we followed a well maintained cycle path along the south bank of the Mawddach River 
all the way into Dolgellau. No traffic worries here - as long as you don't fall off your bike there is no problem! That's just what I did - there are several gates to negotiate along the path. These are intended to stop Motor bikes from invading the track. Reversing into one of these, I lost my balance, and as my foot was still located in the toe clip I was not able to extricate it before toppling over. No damage other than a few grazes fortunately. Shortly afterwards we found a bench beside the track overlooking the Dolgellau cricket ground - a match was in progress between Llangollen and Dolgellau - we rested up for a while, chatted to one of the fieldsmen on the boundary, and generally recovered from the rigours of the day!
The mileage at the end of the day was 22.6 miles.