Close Encounters of the Chicken Kind

A gorgeous sunny Sunday morning, too nice to sit inside! We took the tandem out for an early morning loop. There are some wonderful leafy lanes around here, back roads called B roads. Sometimes not even wide enough for two cars to pass, they meander all over the countryside past farms, sheep and hidden old country houses. The terrain is quite hilly, but the scenery is so beautiful it distracts you from how hard you're pedalling. Shady lanes with the sun filtering through, hedgerows lining the sides with breaks here and there where you glimpse a field, a pasture, the view across a valley. The flowers are out everywhere and the gardens are lush. The rhododendron trees (yes, trees!) which grow wild in the woods here are in full bloom adding a shade of purple to all the green.

And as you pedal down the lane, it smells like summer! Do you remember when you were a kid and you played outside all day during the summer? In the woods, the field or the pasture? Remember how it smelt, hot, a hint of dust, a whiff of flowers and new mown grass? For me, that's the smell of summer.

Along with the flora being out, so was the fauna. We had a close encounter of the chicken kind as one ran out into the road and right in front of the bike as we were zipping along down a hill! Luckily there was no collision and we all rode / flapped away from the incident.

After the leafy lanes, we circled past Houghton Tower . We passed the Houghton Church as they rang the bells for the 10:00 service. The church bells in England sound just like the ones at the end of the movie Scrooge, that very old Englandy sound, very distinct from other places.

I tested out picture taking from the back of the tandem. Taking photographs from the back of the motorbike is something I've been doing for a while now and I was curious to see if it could be done on the tandem. It's so beautiful, I want to take lots of pictures along the way, but it's rather inconvenient to stop every five minutes to take a photo. Seems to work fine except for the delay on my small digital camera, it's an older one with a short pause before it takes the photo. With that, 'on the move' photos can change from the time you press the button from a scenic vista to a Ford Fiesta.

Came back, packed for the motorbike trip to Ireland and planted the rest of our garden (our garden consists of containers on the patio). Julie and Andrew stopped by and we toasted the English sunset. Lovely (and busy) day!