RLE to Lighthorne, 30 October 2019

Club rides are organised by a committee member allocating rides to qualified ride captains in sequence and the direction of the ride is specified. On this occasion I was allocated a ride going south east, so I started by looking for a pub roughly in that direction, and I came across the Antelope in Lighthorne, which we had not been to before. It seemed OK so I plotted a route on the plotaroute.com website that came out at about 50 miles. That was pushing the limit of club day rides at that time of the year, so I followed the route myself beforehand to make sure it didn’t have any difficult sections and also that the pub served decent beer and food. Having satisfied myself on those scores I sent off the route to the club for it to be posted on its website.

In the event the route proved quite popular as it was repeated later by another ride leader. When we were ordering food the barman asked one of our party whether he wanted "soup or chips". Unfortunately the barman had an American accent and what he asked sounded like "Do you want super chips". It took a moment or two to sort that one out.