Excellent ride today guys. Just over 65 miles on the clock for me when I got home.
Andy K and I met up with Ant, Brian, Kees and Jason at CSS at 9:30. Headed out on the CR route to Leigh, but carried on through Holmwood Common and North Holmwood to Dorking, then up the Coldharbour side of Leith HIll, through Holmbury, over Holmbury Hill and down to Peaslake, passing many London Dyanmos and Kingston Wheelers on the way.
From there, it was on to a rather more expensive cafe (tea room) at Shere, where cake was around £2.00 a slice (would have bee cheaper to buy a whole cake for £5.50) and tea was served in "lovely" china cups from a pot, rather than ACC mugs. The tea was quite dear.......I'm sure one fo the other guys will be along to tell you the price later. I don't think I'll be allowed to choose the cafe in future, but I assured them they were all hand sewn tea bags and Brian thought they'd probably all been hand perforated as well!
From Shere, it was up the North Downs (Coombe Hill I think?), up Crocknorth Lane on to Ranmore Common, down to Westhumble, and then a thrash up to the top of Box Hill, where we met Huw and Amy, demolishing cake and tea at the cafe.
After an agreeable chat. we all headed for home as an 8 piece group, except Andy and I split at the top of Pebble HIll to head South to Reigate and Horley.
A nice hilly work-out in agreeable company. All agreed that we ought to do this more often, maybe even as a CR variation on Saturday?
As a postscript, Ant was climbing like a demon today and then told us that he'd given up smoking 20 a day last October. I'm currently trying to find out what he was smoking!