Blueberry picking, Mountain Biking and Geocaching at Nant yr Arian

The school holidays seem to be flying by and the list of things Morgan and I wanted to do during them has barely been touched. We’ve been busy with plenty of other things but thanks to all of this, we haven’t even started on the days of geocaching, mountain biking, surfing, kayaking, gardening, painting and decorating that we had planned, let alone the rainy day activities of building a model plane.

Not to worry, there’s plenty of time for these things at a later date, and we did build a Lego Space Shuttle the other day which was pretty cool.

We also managed to get out in the sunshine yesterday and do a few other activities too.

We drove up to Pendam and parked there, had half of our picnic as we were a little hungry and then set off blueberry picking. It’s getting a little late in the year for them now really, but that didn’t seem to matter this year as there were loads of them. We had filled our pots within less than an hour and now had purple fingers and various purple stains on our legs too. We also had loads of fresh, ripe, juicy sweet blueberries ready to bake some blueberry muffins with.

We then got kitted up and headed off for a mountain bike ride around the Pendam Trail. The sun was now shining but it was pretty wet on the trails thanks to the huge downpour we had experienced overnight. Many of the trails were like rivers which didn’t really help Morgan as the water had washed certain bits away and deposited lots of loose rocky material all over the surface of both descents and climbs.

I had my Garmin Forerunner 910XT so followed close behind Morgan as he had done this trail once before and wanted to compare his times on the various sections using Strava. He did really well, climbing much better, although there were still a few point on the longer climbs where he gets off and pushes. His bike handling is better now as well, and more notably his choice of line has improved. He did really well with just one or two stops for a drink and managed to ride all of the descents easily so it only took us 1hr 14 for the

Here’s his ride as seen on Strava, along with all 15 Trophies that he earned. Pretty good going really and now he really has some targets to beat for next time.

Whilst up there, we also stopped briefly at one of our geocaches – Watery Wales 1 – Llyn Bleanmelindwr. A number of people had posted DNF’s (Did Not Find) on this cache recently so we wanted to check that it was still there. Thankfully it was and all was in good order, so obviously people just haven’t been looking hard enough. Maybe I’ll have to increase the difficulty rating of this one as it is a little tricky for some reason.

We then sat in the sunshine eating our picnic before heading back home, satiated, muddy, loaded with pots of blueberries and having ticked off a few activities from our list.

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Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.

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