I spent the weekend up in dirty old Glasgow to stay with a mate and do the Glas-vegas night-life thing (which is really good by the way - that's at least one thing I'll give the place!). The bike came up with me and I spent a cold Saturday biking the 40kms northwest to Loch Lomond. That is supposedly the oldest house in Glasgow on the left, and George Square in central Glasgow on the right (complete with a sorry-looking Christmas tree at the moment).

I first did this ride just over two years ago and loved it. The route is 95% cycle paths and a few quiet little back roads outside of Glasgow.

Unfortunately there's no avoiding the fact that it starts in Glasgow though hehe.

From crappy suburban Glasgow...

...to something a little easier on the eyes further out.

Last time I did this I had a group of punks hurl dirt clods or something at me, and this time I had punks shooting BB-guns at me hahaha - Glasgow.

Just as I passed beneath the massive road-bridge where Glaswegians who just can't handle another day in Glasgow go to end it all, the odometer clocked 8,000kms (since buying my last bike in April 2007).

This is, umm, actually I don't know where this is, but it's pretty!

With just a few miles to go it started to get interesting. The river I'd been following was incredibly swollen, and here it had broken its bank and flooded the path. That was pretty exciting I thought, and then up around the bend it had flooded over again and was a little deeper.

Further round again it was deeper still hehe (can you see where this is going? ;)

I went slowly through so as not to get my feet wet (never pleasant).

Further round it got deeper again...

...and then it got fucking deep hahaha!

About a foot of water there, and speaking of foot I'd given up trying to keep it dry by this stage.

I'd also given up going slowly, and instead just ploughed on through which gave the bike an awesome clean hehe.

Then it all just got beyond a joke really hehe! The path is under there somewhere, but by this stage I was in about 50cm of water and couldn't see it. Plus I had the current going against me which made the bike bloody hard to handle, and I was sure that at any moment I was about to leave the path and go head first into the drink hahaha!

Literally just few hundred metres to go from here, so in I went - fun!

This is where the path ends. Although you can't see them in this shot people had stopped in their tracks staring at me as I emerged hahaha! ;)

No shit.

Southern tip of the loch (remember, that's Gaelic for lake :) If anyone's interested, this is the route I took to get here from central Glasgow.

I bet I could bike through it ;)

I caught the train back into Glasgow. I was absolutely soaked and left a huge puddle in the train around where I was sitting, but at least the bike was nice and clean! Then we all went into town and got drunk. Hooray :)

Another gig tonight, this time 7-piece New Zealand group Fat Freddy's Drop, with their smooth dub and reggae sounds - nice. No shortage of Kiwis in the crowd!

Welcome to Lyndhurst - a little village in the middle of a massive forest! Nice enough, but not what we drove two hours for.

It was to do this - get the bikes out, and get dirty!

This is all New Forest, in Hampshire, southeast England. Pretty enough, but again not what we came here for.

I brought my beast, Katie hired a heap of shit, and we headed for the trails. First thing we saw was a deserted pram - seemed a little ominous hehe.

This would be awesome in summer when it wouldn't all look like something from The Blair Witch Project!

It was all pretty easy-going for starters, and that got boring, so we got off that trail and made our own fun.

Katie took to it like a pro...

And I was just my usual dickhead self ;)

Before long the bikes and us were all covered in shit from head to toe, and we could literally taste Mother Nature in our mouths (in the form of mud hehe).

The track took us along some cute little forest roads...

Roads with horses roaming along them...

Boggy and hilly fields (Mother Nature didn't taste quite as good here)...

And more forest trails.

Then it took us to this: a deep and fast-flowing ford. This time last week I was biking from Glasgow to Loch Lomond alongside a very flooded river which had covered the cycle path in two feet of water in places, and this was about the same. I powered through it no worries...

She rung herself off...

...the bikes came out nice and clean...

...and we eventually made it back into Lyndhurst. Damn that was fun :)

Welcome to Bath! Katie turns 27 on Wednesday and so I threw her in the car (her work car) and whisked her off here for the weekend, although she didn't know where we were actually going until we arrived. Despite looking pretty dreary in these photos thanks to the tropical British winter, Bath is a really nice little spot. Bath is in the county of Somerset some 150kms west of London, and is home to around 85,000 - most of them skanky-looking teenage girls. Bath plays host to around five million tourists a year and has a lot of history and Roman influence (which I won't bother spouting off here).

So anyway, Bath in a nutshell: Lots of cute little streets with a myriad of shops and cafes and cigarette butts down them...

Cute little courtyards with a myriad of historically-significant buildings and cigarette butts around them...

And boy-racers, driving embarrassing old shitheaps that sound like a trumpet that's been run over by a bus.

This guy really loves his job!

The Royal Crescent - a big-ass crescent of 30 houses built in the 18th century that have been home to various notable people for over the last 200 years, none of whom I've ever heard of.

Apparently some of the residents of those 30 houses have difficulty parking their cars. This chick drove up and 'parallel-parked' her car to where you see it here (that's her walking off to the left).

This guy got half-way done parallel-parking his car in there, and decided rough enough is good enough.

Just down the road from there is this - The Circus, basically just one huge roundabout full of more Gregorian architecture. I read somewhere the other week that at least a couple celebrities own properties around here somewhere, including Johnny Depp.

Man I'd love to go along that on a tube!

Several things about Bath reminded me of Edinburgh, not least of all the bitterly-cold temperature. So yeah, nice place.

Based on the look of some of the chicks walking about, they don't need a bus to 'get around' Bath if you know what I mean.

Anyway back to the Romans. Bath has the only geothermal springs in the UK, and the Romans took full advantage that by creating what are now known as the Roman Baths, used for public bathing back in the day. Bath Abbey can be seen in the background in the shot on the right.

The baths are no longer open to the public for bathing as the water that flows through the them is considered unsafe for doing so. In 1979 a girl swimming in the restored bath swallowed some of the source water and died five days later from amoebic meningitis. Tests showed that a species of amoeba was in the water and the pool has been closed ever since. The newly-construsted Thermae Bath Spa around the corner allows modern-day bathers to experience the waters via a series of more recently-drilled boreholes, and includes an open-air thermal pool on the roof. We went there Saturday night; not as good as the pools in Andorra but not bad.

The Roman Baths has a museum full of random Roman rubbish, including parts of the original baths structure and objects that were hurled into the Sacred Spring (presumably as offerings to the relevant gods at the time).

We drove back to London via Stonehenge, although I'd already ticked this box about a year ago.