It’s time for gravel!
Obeying cycling’s Rule 12 I bought a new bike last Autumn – a Specialized Diverge gravel bike. It came with a fetching pale blue frame, 38mm tyres and an 11-speed 40×12-42 1x drivechain.
I liked the idea of being able to ride where my road bike couldn’t go. I liked too the idea of going for a few days of bike touring, and the Diverge has all the fitting points you’d need to load baggage, either bikepacking style or conventional touring style with front and rear panniers. Some proving rides mixing on- and off-road over the autumn and winter confirmed it was a comfortable ride and coped well with loose surfaces, though the tyres that came with the bike weren’t so good in soft mud. It also confirmed my bike handling has plenty of room for improvement.
So I spent hours reading reviews of bikepacking bags and finally bought a small frame bag and a seatpack. With the help of Komoot I devised a ride from Oxford to Cirencester, outwards on a northerly arc and back taking a southerly route. I waited to find a couple of days with no other commitments and a decent weather forecast and booked a B&B for an overnight stay. And so on a chilly Saturday morning in early April I set off.
I’m glad to say everything went well. The hills in the Cotswolds in the second half of the outward ride were (mostly) short and (always) steep; I found that with the luggage on the bike I could just about struggle up an 11 or 12 percent gradient in bottom gear on tarmac if it wasn’t too long, but I did have to walk the bike up a few hills both on tarmac and gravel. OK, so I’m not as young as I was!
By contrast the return route was mostly flat, but for once Komoot let me down. It was taking me on a bridleway across grassy fields until it came to a river bank – the River Thames, no less! Reverting to the Ordnance Survey map I found I had arrived at Duxford Ford. It’s a genuine ford passable when the river level is low, but this day the river was in full flow and the winter storms had done their damage.
Reluctant to backtrack to the nearest crossing upstream, and with the nearest downstream crossing too far away to make my planned route recoverable, I took the easy option and stayed on the north side of the Thames for the rest of my ride.
Over the two days I covered just over 100 miles and was quite pleased with the whole experience. I think I’ll probably need one more piece of luggage for any longer trips – either that or I could use a small rucksack. I don’t think I’ll be camping; B&B is more my style these days.
A note about Komoot. I’m quite new to this app, but I was impressed by the routes it found for me. I’d specified ‘gravel riding’, and sure enough the route included bridleways as well as quiet back roads that I wouldn’t have bothered navigating using a paper map – too much stopping and checking. Combined with my handlebar mounted Hammerhead Karoo 2 the route was easy to follow and was certainly better than one I might have devised myself from maps alone.
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