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| Single to Bristol please |
I think I saw a chamois at a zoo once, it was like a small deer thing. Wikipedia says it is a goat-antelope species. They are also in my shorts making a big contribution to comfort on this long ride. Originally cycling shorts had an insert with a chamois leather top (to go next to your skin if you see what I mean) and these were essentially rubbish. Hard to keep clean (!) and went hard as a board when washed, not good. Enter chamois cream, which is not made from chamois, but was used to soften the chamois to a usable state.
Fast forward several decades, and we now have synthetic chamois. Not a stuffed toy goat-antelope as you might think, but carefully thought out and tested inserts with contoured variable density padding specially designed to keep yer sit-upon comfy whilst it's being sat upon. And which are machine washable. And anti-bacterial. Not to be out-done, chamois cream has also been re-vamped. My tub is made with synthetic beeswax, wow, wot is a synthetic bee? You don't put it on the pad anymore, you apply it to.. well isn't it obvious? Reading the ingredients it could be part moisturiser, part local anesthetic. And it works.
I was glad of the advances in bum comfort technology today as we grovelled through grimy central Scotland into a continual headwind with 2200ft of climbing. Lots of long dead road-kill (eurgh), poorly repaired surfaces, squally showers and very slow progress. A real first is that we saw no open cafes or pubs and this led to mass consumption of energy bars and gels and an eventual desperate lunch at 3pm in a bus shelter, where I had to eat my emergency pasty. This had been in my barbag since John O'Groats and become fairly disintegrated thanks to getting routinely squashed as other stuff gets put in or taken out. I'd been trying to ignore it in the hope that I'd be able to legitimately throw it away. I really don't like mass produced pasties.
Just after lunch we struck the A74(M) and turned south on the B road that runs parallel to it. Eventually the scenery got better, live wildlife could be seen. We stopped at the motorway services in Abington, looking like aliens amongst the car-borne normal people. Climbed up past the new windfarm, then thankfully the road took a downwards direction for 10 miles or so and we were able to pick up a bit of pace to our destination, the lovely Marchbankwood House just outside Beattock. Just been for dinner at the Star Hotel in Moffat, and all is well with the world - thanks to synthetic chamois and synthetic bees.
Today's ride: 70 miles, 350 miles cumulative. Today's max speed 36mph.
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