Bob’s Run to Hollingworth Lake 8th June
Eight riders arrived at Spring Wood for the start of Bob’s run out to Hollingworth Lake having battled through rain and hail to get there. Luckily as we left the clouds had parted and the sun shone on us. It was a lovely day from then on but the wind was a bit gusty. The run down the Calderdale Valley was very nice and I was surprised to see the amount of trees now growing up the hillsides of the valley. 10 years ago it was bare and looked very bleak in places.
Just after Todmorden there was a lot of traffic and we lost contact with the bikes behind but after stopping for a while and the others not catching us up, Bob went back to look for them and found that Peter’s BMW had given up and mobile phone service was not available on his phone to summon up the recovery service. Alan and John stayed with him as their phones did have signal. By the time the time the RAC turned up it seems the problem had been diagnosed that the battery on the bike had failed. The RAC man had a car battery on board and that was duct taped to the back box of the bike to get it going and Peter, with and Alan in support rode back to Morecambe. Lesson from this is you can’t ride these modern bikes without a battery and you probably need a computer to fix ‘em anyway!
The rest of us carried on up to Hollingworth Lake where we parked up outside the Wine Press and ate our lunches in the sunshine. John caught up with us at Hollingworth. It was very civilised outside the Pub, they had a special parking area marked out for “Solo Motorcycles Only”, not often bikers get that sort of treatment.
From the Lake we headed back towards Todmorden but turned off to travel over the top of the hills to Mytholmroyd and from here down to Hebden Bridge and back to Todmorden. Here we turned for Bacup where we rode over the moors towards Burnley. We stopped on the moors at the Panoptican to take in the view over Burnley, Nelson, Colne and in the distance Barnoldswick.
A while later as we rode down towards Burnley and got to Hapton John’s bike stopped for an unknown reason, but after a while he managed to get it going again and the group carried on back to Whalley.
I had to leave at this point as I needed to run up to Lancaster to delivery birthday presents for a Grandson so I travelled home having had a great day and 145 miles under my belt.
Thanks Bob for great run.