Rendezvous Ride - The Plough at Lower Beeding

The trouble with winter is that it can be cold, wet, dark, gloomy, slippery or all of them at once! You just can't predict what it will be like, so when planning our December rides I thought I'd throw in a Rendezvous Ride to a pub not too far from either Crawley or Horsham. My thinking was that with people being able to choose their own start times and routes, we would all be able to maximize or minimize our mornings exposure to whatever conditions we faced on the day. For myself, I was thinking about possibly meeting up with Anton somewhere south of Handcross (Staplefield perhaps) and riding over to Lower Beeding with him, but a chat with Anton on Saturday evening revealed he wouldn't be riding due to him suffering from a cold. So I decided on a straightforward route, up Pease Pottage Hill, down Grouse Road, left and the Hammerpond, turn right onto Church Lane and then turn right to arrive at Lower Beeding. It was actually so straightforward that I arrived at the pub a full 50 minutes before it was due to open - what a fool!  I hung around for a while but the clock was ticking so slowly I realized I need to do a bit more riding. I rode into the close of new houses that had recently sprung up doubling the village population overnight, but that only wiped a couple of minutes off the clock so I headed south, down and up past (another) hammerpond before stopping to read a noticeboard at the side of the road. The noticeboard described the Sussex Ouse Valley Way and seemed to suggest that the hammerpond was one of the sources of the Ouse. Looking at that, and checking my mapping app on my phone whiled away some time. The I carried on riding down to the junction with the A281 where I turned right (I bet not many people turn right there). I was riding gently along, letting the clock tick away but I was soon turning right and still only a few hundred yards from the pub, As I got close I spotted Norman waving at me and we went around to the pub garden to lock our bikes up. More to come.


More to come - I wrote that nearly two weeks ago! I'd better finish this entry off.....


Neither Norman nor I were expecting anyone else to turn up but as we waited, so we were joined by a new chap who's seen our runslist on the web and then, once we were snugly located in the Saloon Bar in front of the fire, so more and more club members turned up - Pete and Marian, Gordon and Jacqui, Pete E, Frank and Pat, and Ken. Everyone really enjoyed themselves and we spent the best part of two hours there chatting, eating and drinking. What a nice way to prepare for Christmas and all the chatting, eating and drinking that would entail!!


Eventually, we pulled our warm outerclothes back on and headed for home. Together we went down Church Lane to Bucks Head and then Norman and Pete E carried on along Hammerpond Lane as the rest of us went up  Grouse Road back to Pease Pottage and then Crawley.