My cycling club, the Nova Raiders have been asked to feature in the “Ride With” section of Cycling Weekly magazine, where they feature a different cycling club every week and today was the day for a ride with their journalist, Sean and their cameraman, Andy.
We’d scoped out a route to our Sponsor Joule’s brewery in Market Drayton on Wednesday so arranged to meet all the other riders in the B&M car park in Newport at 9:30 this morning. We’d normally have met in The Square, but with the Newport Carnival on today, we opted to keep well out of the way of people setting up for the Carnival.
About 50-60 Raiders turned out, most of them in Raiders kit! This should make for some perfect photos! We all re-located to The Square for a big group photo for the magazine before starting the ride.
The Steady group then split off and that left more Intermediates than we could take on one ride. We this split into two groups, with the group I was in riding with Sean and Andy was leapfrogging the group in his car, stopping to get in-ride shots at various vantage points.
We had a quick briefing from Sean on what to expect on the ride with regard to the photos and off we set. We avoided the High Street and opted for Water Lane to keep out of the way of the carnival.
It was a lovely ride out to the brewery, stopping to let Andy in his car past every so often and then composing ourselves for the resulting photo. He must have got quite a few excellent shots as he picked some great points to capture us from!
At. the brewery, the other two groups had already arrived and clapped us all in as we arrived. Loved it!
We had the Mouse Room booked for us with coffee/tea and then delicious homemade cakes from various kind members of the club. Lovely. The other groups had made good work of the cakes already so we all got stuck in before they all went.
Then it was time for the group photo outside, with numbers to show how much we raised for charity on our recent Route 66 sportive – £4505!!! See the photo at the top of this.
We then all set off back to the club HQ – the New Inn in Newport. With no photographer for this section of the ride, we all upped the pace a lot and were soon back in Newport enjoying a cold beer in the lovely sunshine and doing one of the things Raiders do best – socialising.
The article is slated for publication on 27th July this year and I can’t wait to see how it comes out. I think we presented the absolute best of our club today and am a very proud member of the club.
Route: click here
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