As it happened the forecast for Sunday was wrong. Whilst it was not exactly a nice summer's day, it wasn't chucking it down as predicted. A quick text in the morning and Ricky was picking me up for a trip over to Sherwood Pines in the afternoon. We figured the trails over there should be okay despite the recent rain?

We had both chosen hardtails as our bikes of choice and after a quick visit to the shop so Ricky could buy a seat quick release for his new bike we started off on The Kitchener Trail. Heading towards the start Ricky's front mech wouldn't shift right so we had a quick fettle to get it adjusted. While we were doing so quite a few cyclists entered the trail but despite the car park being rammed we didn't see too many people once we were ridng proper and never really got held up anywhere.

We rode a combination of Kitchener Trail sections and off-piste singletrack roughly doing a loop round the forest similar to the Kitchener but with deviations here and there. Trail conditions couldn't have been better. The ground was hard but the rain had got rid of any dust. The fast flowy sections were great fun and the less ridden off-piste stuff was excellent.

Neither of us had ridden the forest for quite some time so it was a nice change to most of the riding we've been doing recently. We had a couple of short stops for Ricky to pump up his back tyre until the slime did its job before we eventually got to the "Bike Park" where we started by checking out the jumps. There weren't any riders there to watch so we had quick go on the easy table tops before heading off to do a couple of runs down the Bike Park. There were a few other riders around this area but it was still surprisingly quiet. We stopped for a bit of a play on one of the north shore drops but my riding wasn't brilliant and Ricky's photography was even worse!

Continuing we both failed to do "The Folly" - a tricky rooty step on a steep climb before we then discovered what used to be known as "The Training Lap" had been trashed by forestry work and the trail re-routed along the fire road. Towards the end of our lap we had a quick stop for some jelly beans and discussed how good some of the sections were as long as you pedalled hard to get the most out of them.

As we approached the car park after a couple of hours it began raining. Good timing! We packed up quick and headed home. It was a good blast and a nice change of scenery.