I’ve wondered about setting up a crazyguyonabike journal to record our cycling trips, but since I don’t post enough here anyway…

Yesterday we put the bikes in the back of the car, drove to Lechlade, and cycled from there to Oxford. (We’re doing a Changing Places in WW on the Upper Thames and I needed to take the modern pics.) Our route, in brief, was: Lechlade->Mill Lane->old B4449 past Kelmscott->Clanfield (”mentioned in the Domesday Book” – er, like everywhere)->Bampton->Shifford Lock->Hinton Waldrist->detour to Newbridge->Appleton->Bablock Hythe (south bank)->rather muddy bridleway->Farmoor->Eynsham->via A40 to Godstow and Oxford->Royal Oak->cheeseburger.

Generally a lovely ride: pretty flat, at least until you get nearer Oxford and the valley narrows; some quiet roads; and bakingly hot. After our previous ride on proto-NCN45 via Upton-on-Severn, where we encountered a downpour of morris dancers, I was rather expecting to find the same in Bampton but sadly not.

There was one utterly wonderful highlight on such a hot day, which was this:

Duxford Ford is the one forded crossing of the River Thames (clearly not the navigation channel), on a bridleway from Chimney to Hinton Waldrist. You wouldn’t try it in the winter; the current was still pretty considerable even this weekend. But wading across, pushing the bike, it was a real delight on such a hot day.

What wasn’t so great? The traffic in some places was lousy, particularly the A415 at Newbridge, which was bad beyond belief. We witnessed two near-accidents and at least one “what the hell are these cyclists doing on my personal racetrack” wanker who was, inevitably, driving an expensive German automobile. The pubs are all Greene King. Really. At Newbridge there are two pubs, one on each side of the river: both are run by Greede Kerching. It must be the first Strongbow I’ve had in at least a year.

And: there really needs to be a bridge at Bablock Hythe. It would have made our route so much easier, safer, and more pleasant. The arguments for the bridge (the single break in the Thames Path, Oxford-Witney cycle route, etc. etc.) have been rehearsed so many zillion times before that I won’t bore you with them.

But really – it’s just like the Oxford-Cambridge railway; one of those staggeringly obvious schemes that never gets done because highway engineers are still the sort of people against whom Robert Aickman used to rage furiously in early IWA Bulletins. (”Motor Moloch”, the column was called.) At one point we passed a lonely “Oxfordshire Cycleway” sign, a disconnected remnant of a now-abandoned route, closed by Oxfordshire County Council because of rising traffic levels. Heaven forfend that they actually do something to make the roads bearable for those not in BMWs, of course.

So next time, I think we’d divert onto the back roads and head back to Charlbury via Witney, or maybe Minster Lovell, rather than hacking into Oxford. Still, a great ride.

After a day sitting staring at a computer screen (preparing my “speech” for Wednesday), I decided to take off on my bike, get the 17.06 train to Moreton-in-Marsh, and cycle back.

Handy hint: when a friendly-sounding book such as Cycling in the Cotswolds describes a bridleway as “a little sticky after rain”, it actually means “an appalling quagmire that a rhinoceros would be hard-pushed to make its way through, let alone a cyclist on a hybrid”.

Still, I made it. What happened to the light evenings? Hmph.

On Saturday, we followed our favourite ride from Charlbury, via Middle Barton, to Banbury – except this time with stickers.

So you can now, for the first time in n years, find your way along Route 5 from Kiddington to Banbury without a map – even on the rather winding section through Bloxham. We need to go back at some point to add two diagonal arrows in the southbound direction (one near the Warriners School, one at the farm near the windmill), for reassurance more than anything else, but it’s looking pretty good. Perhaps the best thing about the blue signs is that they’re their own form of advertising: NCN 5 is now so much more visible in Bloxham, in particular, and hopefully that’ll encourage local people to explore the route in either direction.

Then, on Sunday, we cycled to Woodstock – in particular, Blenheim Palace. Blenheim is on Route 5, too, but we took the opportunity to go via Ditchley Lodge Gate and the long avenue towards the memorial column. The avenue is very definitely off-limits to cyclists – “Footpath Only, No Motorists, No Bicycles” – but for the next bit – “except on business”. And we were on business, for it was the first Bike Blenheim Palace, and we were helping on the Sustrans stand.

And what did people want? They wanted maps. By the time we turned out, all the NCN national maps had already gone. I’d designed a leaflet for the route from Witney to the Cotswolds, and the nice people in Bristol had printed a bunch; we ran out of that by about 3pm, too. The Phoenix Trail map (Thame-Princes Risborough) was in high demand – lots of families wanting traffic-free routes.

It was a really encouraging day – for the Sustrans ranger work, of course, realising that most cyclists actually like the NCN and aren’t quite as rabid as certain forums I could mention; for our nascent efforts to improve cycling in Charlbury, demonstrating exactly why it’s worthwhile developing better routes and facilities; and for the OSM surveying work for OpenCycleMap, which provided the underlying data for the Witney-Cotswolds map and could be the foundation for a thousand such leaflets.