Well and truly 'STUFFED' in

We set off about 5:30pm Friday, loaded up with 3 bikes, pads, helmets, food, stoves, drink, spares, music, sleeping-bags all stuffed into the Astra. ‘We’ consisting James B (aka ‘Billy’), Phil (aka ‘Phil’) and Myself (aka 'Hutch'). Emily was to join us later on, somewhere just past the bridge. We’d planned to get going earlier to avoid London traffic but I kind of forgot to mention this to my bosses.. so when the question came "can I shoot off at 3:30 today?" the reply was "um..nope!".

Blair Witch?.. i thought so

Traffic on the M25 was hell so we decided to ditch the Severn Bridge idea, Emily would have to make her own way to Abergavenny. We finally met up just north of Aber at about 10:15pm.. The journey had taken hours even though Billy drives like Taz on speed. Out came OS maps sprawled across the bonnet and Mini-MagLites. By 11pm we’d found a spot right near Talybont Reservoir and started setting up camp. It was black and for the first few minutes I was thinkin "Blair Witch.." but Billy being a landscape gardener type had bailers twine strung between the trees in no time and we had cover. Next we got to building a fire and cooking tea.. so far so good.

I didn’t sleep.. not a bit so when it started to get light at 4am I strolled up the nearest hill. Coming to these areas is good for the soul I swear.. The pic above taken just before sunrise.. it was great. Anyway enough of that tree-huggin-hippie-crap.
I made my way back down to the camp and found that we had been joined but several hundred thousand kamikaze psycho Gnats!
 

Flames (Gnat Repellant)

After hiding in our sleeping bags and going back to sleep for about an hour we made fire to keep them at bay.. it worked ok but we still got bitten loads.

Billy Frying.. not sure what!

Billy was designated head-chef for the weekend and got the bacon going; the rest of us milled around, kept the fire going, tweaked our bikes in preparation for the onslaught to come, and attempted to deny as many Gnats as possible of their lives. After breakfast and shoring up the camp we set off to actually do some ridin.

The first few hours were interesting, within 10 mins of riding we were spattered with sheep crap.. nice. Then we start climbing up the side of a.. um.. small mountain i suppose. When we reached the top there was much rejoicing to find a track. On the way up I'd drawn first blood with a wheel-rut-arm-stones interface.. Only a few grazes. After riding this track for a while Phil got a bit over excited at our first maginal downhill.. he shot off over some stones and ended up gettng a blow-out and hiting a fence. The BANG was pretty loud so the rest of us knew we had a compulsory rest.
Several miles further on we met another hill; Billy and Phil are way too fit for me and decided that if they climbed up (read 'near vertical') there was guaranteed 'downness' the other side. Em and I waited around the other side to watch.. it was funny.. The descent was very steep and covered in those mossy grassy humps you get in all places rural. Phil lead and came down well fast, switching the backend left and right to avoid the humps (if your a boarder, this was basically a grass mogul field). Billy was fast too but did go over the top once. We found out later that his forks had been setup wrong and were slamming into his front wheel at every compression... not good.
After that we pegged it down this little narrow lane. Phil and Em were gone before i'd even started so i raced to catch up. Because my chain was ticking I looked to see; I looked up (by this point going pretty quick) and saw THE corner.. I hadn't even been aware of it, slammed on the brakes and skidded out of control, spinning along the grass bank a few times only to end up on the road again. Billy thought all this was VERY funny.. he had been behind and watched the whole thing.
 

Cider aids wood chopping stylee

While i'd been on the Floor Phil had a nasty accident further down the lane. He'd sped over a cattle grid and his already slit tire caused another blowout on the slightly gravely road surface. Apparenly his backend flipped out and he did a first class face-plant into the road. His helmet (flippin lucky to be wearing one!) was dented and grazed on the front and he had pierced the inside of his top lip with his teeth. He also had cuts on his hand, arm and chin.. Someone has photographic evidence which i'll add to this report soon.
Phil was well ard' and insisted that he wasn't hurt (uh.. blood?) but we had no more inner tubes. We slowly made our way down to the pub and drank some wicked local Cider.. nice stuff.
Several hours later we got back to the camp, cooked, changed.. did the usual stuff.

We all had a MUCH better sleep saturday night after quite a few ciders and stellas.. It was broken at least once in the early hours when each one realised he or she was being rained on and moved up under billys creation (the cover, not his food) but we all promptly fell fast asleep again. We eventually got up at about 8:30 and billy cooked again.. a mighty feast of bacon sandwiches and stella.. nice. It didn't take us long to gat al packed up and in the meantime Em had convinced us to visit Mountain Ash. We are SO glad she did now.

On the way there we took a look at Gethin but it was pretty sticky. On arriving at Mountain Ash the sun was shinning and we padded up.

Locals: Dale, James & Grant

Firstly we walked up through the course sessioning little sections. I was finding the going a bit difficult being the most inexperienced (read 'crappest') of the 4 but Emily was SWEEEET.. showing us the perfect lines to take and exactly how it should be done. After 10 mins on the course the 3 of us lads we seriously awed.. we were clearly not worthy. On our final complete run down we passed 3 Local guys who then came in hot pursuit. All of them steamed past me and all 6 were at the bottom when i finally arrived. I think we were all so STOKED! We chatted to the lads for a while, Grant(right),his cousin Dale(left) and James in the middle all said they rode the course regularly.. if only we had that near us!. Emily knew the course having raced on it quite a few times at the Dragons but for Phil, Billy and I it was a new experience.. one we WILL be doing again.

It was time to go.. the weekend had seemed like a week and we were all fully stoked.

Blood Letting..

I suggested emily do a jumps on a small table top near the cars so she had a go. I feel bad now because it wasnt a good jump and she had just done a very fast descent. She decided to do a one hander and landed it skew and hit the loose gravel. A bad end to a great weekend for Emily.
All in all the weekend went well though, were were all shattered, We've all been dined on bye hundreds of Gnats and ALL of us have drawn blood.. (billy believed he had got away with it but later found a cut on his shin.. haha!). One thing i learned from the mountain ash course is that the XTR V's on the rear of my bike HAVE to go.. they will just not do!.