I went out on the bike again today. When I left my mum's phone was reading -3ºC so we should have realised at that point it was not necessarily a brilliant idea. The roads, however, had been gritted and seemed to be ok.
As we left the main roads and ventured onto the quieter country lanes a man in a van stopped, rolled down his window and warned us that it was icy up ahead. We thanked him and carried on, perhaps just a little more cautiously, just in case.
It was clear that there was frost on the road but we encountered no difficulty until we tried to cycle up a hill. There were some much more slippery patches where you would pedal, and the pedals did not seem to turn the wheels which just skidded over the ice. The effect was that all the effort I put into pushing the pedal did not move me an inch. It was still no big problem though and we carried on slowly.
We then reached the bottom of a hill, where there was a GIANT puddle; perhaps a remnant of the recent flooding - it covered the whole road and looked fairly deep - certainly not something to cycle through anyway. We decided that if we walked through the puddle with the bikes our feet would get soaked, which would not be fun on such a cold day, so we turned round to go back.
It was only at that point (being on our feet, instead of the bikes) that we realised just how icy the road was. It was literally covered in a sheet of ice; not unlike an ice rink. We walked with the bikes a fairly long way, until the ice sheets had subsided into more of a frosty covering but to be honest, walking was much harder!! The bike skidded away from me and my feet could not get a grip on the floor at all.. I had to bend my knees to lower my centre of gravity and walk along ridiculously slowly holding the brakes on the bike!! I must have looked such a sight.
We did end up doing a good 7 miles in the end, but we went back to the main roads and just put up with the traffic instead of the ice!
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