6th June 2018
Journey Length 14.6ml
Click Here For Route Via Ride with GPS
A lovely sunny Wednesday morning walking the dog and I was thinking towards tonight’s adventure. Now as many of our regular readers know Thursday night is our usual night of adventure but due to Grahams upcoming holiday we had decided to change to this evening. Due to this I decided to message Graham, uncannily he must have had the same thought at exactly the same time as his message arriving as I sent mine, spooky.
Where to go was the question on my mind, we had previously decided to make this weeks a easy one. As I thought , I made the decision to meet Graham at the weir in Moses gate Country park and see where it led from there, then I thought of a route we could take, run it by Graham and we would be off.
As I arrived at the weir I was only there for a second when I saw him coming down the path, precision timing of the extreme bikers from Bolton.
We rode around the park and looking across the lake at the swans in the bright sunlight, as we did Graham spotted what he called a vagrant lay on a bench “that’s a bit strange” he remarked. As he led the way we rode up the very steep hill up to Lower Rawson St. Graham unlike myself got to the top without too much difficulty I thought,but as I caught him up he was leaning on a post a little out of breath “ think I peaked to early there pal”. Now we were on our way to Farnworth Park but first we took a detour to look at the refurbishment of Farnworth bus terminus, not really a lot happening.
We took a shortcut to the park which has sadly changed for the worst. We rode up to the part that used to house the swings and roundabout but all that was there now was just an area of grass. As we exited onto Gladstone Rd and headed towards the now almost finished bridge at Moses Gate. On a previous adventure “Fred Dibnah Local Legend” we had found a path that ran alongside St Peters way and I wanted to ride it from the opposite direction. It was extremely overgrown, in places it was almost impossible to follow but we did, it’s just what we do.
As we came out onto Raikes Ln I spotted a discarded random item , a X-Box game in its case, a bit bizarre. I placed it on the fence and we rode on to Manchester Rd to look at the sinkhole much to Graham’s excitement ,that had appeared the previous week .
The sinkhole was not that large but nevertheless it was a hole, with a big blue circle painted around it, Graham joking “they’ve painted the circle around it so they know where the hole is“. Then he started the jokes “hole ee Moses” ,“ bet whoever drove over that had a sinking feeling” and “bet they felt a bit down when they hit that”. Back to a more serious note I was telling Graham about the terrible accident that had happened near the new bus terminal , causing it’s closure and how it might affect us, “ how come I don’t know about any of these things” Graham asked despondently ,sadly I didn’t have an answer.
Now we headed towards our third Park of our little jaunt, Haslam Park, once again it was all new to us. Entering we saw a path, which according to my maps (yes we are going old school again),led us down in the right direction. The path went down a long sweeping hill. Graham had set off whilst I took a photo. I caught up with him at the bottom where he was waiting. Bang crash I rode into the back of him. He had stopped but I was thinking he would set off. Recovering from the shock “path “ he said pointing to his right, “Ooops sorry mate, well spotted”
The path went down a long flight of gavel steps, which I negotiated with ease after last week’s accident. The same couldn’t be said for Graham. The steps around a bend returned back up the hill, where I found Graham and his bike in a heap.
We were soon across Middlebrook heading back towards the town centre stopping off on the small bridge over the brook where we saw a slim dark Pole, never spoke just stood there still as anything, then Graham corrected me it wasn’t a Pole it was in fact a fishing net. That was the 3rd random thing we had seen. We sat on the bridge admiring the wildlife only yards from the busy town centre, when Graham remarked “look at it all around here, the Victorians would be turning in their graves!!”
Our next Park was to be Queen’s Park, which Graham was taken aback by. It’s a beautiful park and well maintained , a lovely park which we both agreed you could spend a great deal of time in with your family. We had a good ride around, even seeing the ducks on the pond before we set off to the town centre.
Victoria Sq was a hive of activity outside the Town Hall, there were numerous buses arranged around the steps and quite a lot of noise and people so we went to investigate. It actually turned out to be an outside production on “Summer Holiday” by the Octagon Theatre, so we actually got to take in a Show on our travels.
After the outside performance we set of towards our last Park of our adventures, Leverhulme Park. This is not as well kept as Queen’s park, the bowling green in particular is nothing more than an overgrown area of grass but nevertheless overall it is still quite a nice park. Sadly with all the council cutbacks these are the areas to feel it most.
So once again it was time for us to part and go our own way til next time, still remembering the obligatory text “ home safe”.
