Witnessing the birth of a new life, (and how to cycle over a lamb)!

I’ve been up to the Peak District last weekend for some more cycling around the area with my good mate Dave.

Here's Dave doing his Tango man impression.

We started of with a good climb up a very rocky hill. It was quite tiring to climb up the hill after a week of exercise, but I made it up to the top eventually.

We saw three other bikers along the way, which were on a similar route from the very beginning. We kept catching them up and then letting them go on ahead for the first few miles.

Dave came off his bike along the top of the hill. I was just following him when his back wheel skidded on a rock and he slid off into the bushes.

Then we had a great descent along the side of a hill. At some points the path was only six inches across and with a sheer drop on one side it was quite exciting to ride along. Both of us kept thinking not to look down or even steer down the hill. We both made it down and had a good laugh over the past couple of miles.

This is a panoramic view just before the side of the hill ride.

At this point the bridle path had come to and end and we had a choice to either turn back or take a footpath over some fields. We decided to push on on the footpath and had a few styles to negotiate along the way.

There were also plenty of streams of various depths to cross. Some of them were quite easy and a few quite tricky as well. Neither of us got really wet feet but we did have to put our feet in the water at least once.

Here's Dave crossing one of the streams. You can just see a little drop on the right, which put Dave off a little as he came to it. Of course I managed to cross the stream without any problems, honest!

When approaching one of the small lambs it turned to see me and then came straight towards me. I had just come to a stop and the lamb ran straight into my front wheel. I caught the rear right of the lamb and saw it limp off. I had to cycle off while hearing it call out in distress, because I knew I couldn't do anything about it. Dave who was following me said it was fine once it had stopped hobbling around.

Some of the violent attacking lams on the hillside.

We saw some highland cows when cycling up one hill. I didn’t notice them till Dave saw them. I think I was too busy concentrating on my cycle up the hill.

At one point Dave came across one of the highland cows, which had just given birth to a calf. Here you can see it eating up the afterbirth off the calf. So fantastic and yet so disgusting at the same time!

We then had to negotiate some really rocky up and down tracks along the top of the hills. It was quite a challenge and some of the rocks that we had to cycle over looked much too big to cycle over but with some speed and a big smile I made it over them.

One of the rocks decided to get its own back on me. As I cycled over one my front wheel kicked up the rock and it went straight into my right lower leg. At first it didn’t hurt to much but as I tried to cycle on it started to hurt more. I came to a halt and found a nice big bump on my leg.

When coming down the hill there was one track, which was covered in loose white stones. It was quite fast going coming down the track and at the end both Dave and I had insane smiles on our faces. We both said that at one point we almost came off the bikes at speed. I think if either of us had come off down the hill we would have had quite a serious accident.

Once we got back to a main road we headed back to the car. There was one final good uphill cycle to finish the route off, and a marvellous few hours out in the Peak District.

Here we are back at Dave's communicating to each other in our usual way. Just like at work.

Jennifer was obviously very impressed with her dad.

More extreme sports on Sunday afternoon. I even had a go next, Dave wasn't needed to push me though.