The nice weather brought a big turnout of 12 riders at the Clock Tower this morning (possibly the highest number so far this year?).  Just before 9:00 we saw a large group from Bird Hills go past heading off on what looked to be a long and fast ride out towards Thame.

Before we left however - an important task.  I had received a lot of complaints that last week's report from Box Hill omitted an important feature.  Rob missed last week's group photo, so I took a separate photo of him there and quickly pasted it on.  Unfortunately I only had his top half in the photo, so for those who have wanted to see them, from the station car park this morning, here is a picure of Rob's legs!!!

Having a large group with a wide variety of experienced and new riders, it was going to be difficult to keep together all the way round.  The other restriction we were aware of was that it would make sense to avoid Henley with the Regatta going on.  So we decided to go via Cookham and Bourne End and then up Frieth Hill and decide what to do from there.  We kept together well as a group all the way to Bourne End, though spread out a bit along the road to Marlow, but regrouped at the bottom of Frieth Hill.  We all climbed Frieth Hill at our own pace and regrouped at the crossroads.  At that point we decided to climb further up towards Stokenchurch.  A slight mishap on a corner and a slight misdirection led to a group of 6 at the back.  There had been some talk of doing a quick descent and climb back on the other side of the Chilterns from Stokenchurch.  Looking at Strava it looks as if the faster members of our group met up with the Bird Hills guys coming back.  Also while we went past Stokenchurch, it seems the faster members were indeed doing this extra descent/climb. 

Our back group (who were in fact now the front group but didn't know it!) were down to 5 at this stage and headed towards Christmas Common,  As usual on a weekend in the Chilterns there were arrows all over the place indicating organised rides and as we descended to Fingest we came across a lot of riders climbing the hill on a London to Oxford charity ride (I'd have thought there was an easier route than up that hill!).  As we headed towards Hambledon with the intention of returning via Marlow I though that going across the weir would make a change and still avoid the Henley traffic.  Well it did avoid the road traffic, but not actually the river traffic!  We had to wait sometime at the lock to let through a load of boats heading towards the Regatta.  Having crossed Knowl Hill, Elsa and Sophie decided to go a bit further towards Waltham while the rest of us headed along the A4 (apparently not long after some of the faster members of our group who looked as if they had decided to go through Henley).

As I mentioned earlier, it is difficult to keep together a large group with a variety of abilities, but I hope everyone had an enjoyable ride.  One thing Kevin has suggested is a Facebook group on which we can discuss who is coming out each week and possibly agree (and download?) a route beforehand.  Seems a good idea but obviously requires members to use Facebook rather than the club website.  Any thoughts on this welcome.