Over the hump.

As planned by my daughter the day before, we set off after breakfast towards the entertainment centre where the four wheeled bikes were kept. She kept insisting that some of them were go-karts, which she has recently been apparently excelling at whilst with Day Care.  I kept trying to explain that some were actually four seater bikes which had two pedal powered seats at the rear for adults, and two smaller seats on the front for children. Because these sort of bikes had steering wheels rather than handle bars, she considered they were not bikes but go karts.

The bike that we hired had only one wheel at the front so it was actually a trike of sorts. As the first leg of our journey was to be downhill, I insisted that I took charge of the steering (these bikes can really shift downhill!) but once we arrived on the flat, making any progress   took on a different perspective entirely.

Speed ‘bumps’ or humps were placed strategically along the path to stop any foolish car driver from exceeding the speed limit of 10 mile per hour and running over unsuspecting campers as they sauntered along it, or even worse, colliding with foolish  novice peddlers out for a spin on one of the parks bikes.  Once we reached the flat, we ground to a halt at the first speed hump we encountered, and I then spent most of my time pushing and shoving at the back of the bike whilst Kerri made some vain attempts to steer and keep us on the path. She does tend to suffer from a certain amount of delusion where being able to drive is concerned.  She insists that she could jump into any vehicle tomorrow and drive away safely, easily able to handle steering, changing gear, the car itself, mirrors etc. It’s all a piece of cake in her mind, whereas in reality, as I discovered as I very nearly did myself an injury at the rear, she happily steered us into the grass and between the vans, colliding with refuse bins and so on in the process.

As I began to recall from my younger days spent as children at Wallis’s holiday camp at Cayton Bay Scarborough, these vehicles are fine when you are travelling downhill but sadly come to a grinding halt on any other type of surface, where even if you are lucky enough to be accompanied by someone who has very powerful pedalling legs, they are really hard to move. They seem to become virtual tanks, weighing tons with no means to enable any motion from the pedals at all.  Nor did it help that the one in charge of steering whilst I battled to get the bike to move forward, couldn’t even keep it on the relatively smooth path.  My legs were aching, my back was aching and so before I fell to the floor with exhaustion I threw in the towel in defeat and we limped back (well, I limped, she rode) to the hire area and parked up the bike.

By now I was about ready to pass out, so we had a welcome cup of coffee in the small cafe nearby so that I could get my strength back. For lunch we decided to take the reverse walk down the cliff path down to the Bluff Inn. As you can see from this photo that Kerri took, I’m still managing to remain upright and smiling despite my ordeal earlier.

We had our lunch in the Bluff Inn and on our return up the road back to camp, we met a lady who was obviously staying in one of the holiday villas that line the road up from the Inn to the Park. She was about to take a gorgeous long haired white Alsatian dog out for his walk. Kerri and I stopped to admire him and in our usual fashion we asked her about him. He was only eight months old and already quite large. I made her laugh by saying that if he was mine, I would have called him Ghost after the white wolf owned by Jon Snow in the Game of Thrones series.  Kerri took some photos of him as did I.  As with all young dogs, he was very skittish and didn’t know what to look at next!

So far, we hadn’t really ventured from the holiday park, but as the bus service from the park left a lot to be desired, we were somewhat handicapped as to venturing any distance. They didn’t arrive outside the park until 8.45am at the earliest (to Penzance) and the last bus was about 18.00pm! Not a lot of time to enjoy a day out further afield.  We went for another swim in the pool later that afternoon, and then made plans to visit St Ives the following day.

When it comes to push and shove. VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

I’m enclosing  some more photos of our day which you can view as a slideshow by clicking on them.

TG

Technorati Tags: bike,steer,hump,push,lunch,alsation,walk,bus