A Dart is a point to point ride of at least 200 km. You have to cover 200 km within 12 hours

On a pitchy winter night, when a gale is hurling rain against the window and the cat sits by the cat-flap with paws crossed, miaowing indignantly in a pointed and personal way, it's pleasant to recall sunlit rides in balmy weather.

Unfortunately my memory doesn't stretch that far back, so you'll have to put up with an account of my rides to and from the Audax UK AGM. I did see the sun once or twice that weekend, at any rate...

At one time-and this was even after the idea of starting a 300 km event at 2 am had ceased to strike me as, well, a little eccentric and perhaps not altogether the kind of thing I could see myself doing-I would have blanched at the thought of riding a 200 in late November. Followed by another 200 a couple of days later. After all, everybody knows that winter kilometres feel like miles. However, thanks to the brain-softening effects of hours in the saddle (and the hammock), the Dinner Dart seems to have become firmly established as part of my season.

My first Dart was from Goring to Wortley Hall, in the company of a small but select peleton (John Miller, Chris Beynon, Mark Waters, Jeremy Clegg from Guernsey). Jeremy didn't let trifling matters like the time of year, temperature, and precipitation deter him from riding without gloves, and in shorts. After going through a Blue Period, his legs eventually opted for an interesting shade of purple. The 200 km turned out to be more like 250 (I have since discovered that this, erm, elasticity is a common characteristic of non-calendar events). We encountered a lot of rain, an enormous queue of traffic somewhere near East Midlands Airport, and a wonderful B&B in Matlock. It seemed like fun. Particularly in retrospect. The next year Ian Hennessey and I rode from Honiton to Llandrindod Wells. There was more rain, and the distance was even more elastic. Famished and knackered on a dark and cold evening, we reeled alarmingly into a quiet village store in Peterchurch. Ian grabbed a family-size pack of Eccles cakes, and there it was, gone. I'm almost-but worryingly not quite-sure he removed the packaging first.... Ian's front light went phut between Hay-on-Wye and Builth Wells, so I lent him my headtorch. My front light went phut on a descent just before we entered the lit roads around Llandrindod. Naturally I didn't know that lit roads were just around the corner, and therefore spent a chilly few minutes changing the bulb. What larks!

In 1999 the weather forecast made no mention of rain. Boring or what? I tried to maintain the entertainment quotient by setting off from Oxford for Wortley Hall with Dave Collins at nine on Friday evening. This may sound (OK, I admit it: this was) ludicrous, but it worked out very well. We confused some dazed clubbers at an all-night garage in Derby in the small hours, flaked out for 40 minutes or so in the world's coldest bus shelter (just beyond Matlock, in case you're planning a visit), and were rewarded for our exertions with a magical dawn in the Peak District. It was still very cold, but we managed to find a hill or two so we could warm up. Even better, this was the perfect excuse to nod off at the AGM.

The first task with a Dart is to devise a suitable route. I wanted something over 200 km, but not too heroically over-after all, this is a late November ride. Weston-Super-Mare is too close to Reading to permit an "as the crow flies" 200, or even, given the autumn's weather, an "as the cyclist paddles" 200. Fortunately I had the node map for Peter Coulson's wonderful Mesh permanents to hand. PC's permanents have nodes at Goring, near Reading, and Cheddar, near Weston. It looked as though Reading-Romsey-Shaftesbury-Weston would fit the bill nicely.

Detailed route planning can be tricky on any permanent ride. A road atlas will get you from conurbation to conurbation, but isn't much help when you have to pick a route through anywhere bigger than a village. If you have Internet access, this is where www.multimap.com comes in.... You can type in a placename or a postcode and summon up maps at any scale up to 1:10,000 (at which scale the map shows street names). It's a real boon for the twiddly bits on any permanent and allows you to produce something resembling a proper route sheet in advance, rather than pore over maps at every other junction.

Chris Rutter, another of the Three Unwise Men who set a new Easter Arrow record distance in 2000 (the others being Ian Hennessey and, well, modesty forbids... Well, no, actually it doesn't), turned out to be contemplating a Dart from the Reading area. I warned him I'd be riding something peculiar, but he wasn't to be deterred. We arranged to rendezvous at first light in a bus shelter by the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment near Aldermaston. Shh, keep it under your hat...

D Day dawned very chilly, so the hat I kept it under was a fetching 3,000 candlepower fluorescent yellow woolly job (I've noticed that people are oddly reluctant to follow me when I'm wearing this hat, as though they don't want it in their field of view). I crossed Reading by a cunning route designed to avoid the worst of the traffic. Unfortunately it soon became evident that I'd mis-measured the map, and Chris was on the verge of hypothermia by the time I made it to the bus shelter. I hoped the rest of the distances on our route wouldn't be that far out...

The peculiar something I was riding was a prototype (actually, the prototype) Trice Micro recumbent trike. This is a very low, narrow, light machine with wheels of a size more normally encountered on a Brompton folding bike. It's barely wider than a conventional bike, and, fully equipped with three mudguards, LightSpin dynamo, front light plus a couple of extra LED front lights, two rear lights, rack, three bottle cages, and computer, weighs a svelte 37lb in prototype form. I'd already ridden a 200 km in France on the Micro, but this was my first real excursion with a relatively heavy load-a couple of small (but bulging) panniers.

We set off, relishing the rare, albeit weak sunshine but not the busy commuter traffic which made it a challenge to cross the major road at Kingsclere. Soon we were climbing over the fog-shrouded escarpment of the downs-no views from the top today. The road roller-coastered to Whitchurch, but, even so, the heat generated by the climbs was not quite enough to maintain sensation in my feet, despite neoprene overshoes. Mist hovered above fields rimed with frost. Although, in the interests of avoiding grit, grot, and floods, our route to Romsey was mostly B-road and A-road, traffic soon abated.

I'd thought we might have to use a garage as a control in Romsey, so it was a bonus to encounter an open teashop at an Aquatics Centre on the outskirts. It didn't seem to be doing much of a trade-presumably everybody had seen more than enough water lately without making a special excursion to see some more.

For the bit from Romsey to Fordingbridge I'd reversed a section of an old Hard-Boiled route. It was interesting to travel these roads in daylight rather than in the small hours, and to note that Shawn Shaw's rides provide attractive scenery even when you won't be able to see it... Skirting flood debris, we climbed through common and woods until we emerged onto rolling New Forest heathland, where the trike caused consternation among wild ponies grazing by the roadside.

By the time we reached Cranborne the skies were becoming increasingly grey and threatening. The rain began in earnest in Sixpenny Handley. I stopped to buy an energy drink to fuel me for the climb to Shaftesbury, and stepped out of the maze-like village store into a steady drizzle. Sixpenny Handley had always seemed a relatively big place when I'd encountered it towards the end of Porkers, but it seemed far smaller and far more rural today.

Chris had a brief panic after Sixpenny Handley, thinking he'd dropped his wallet in the village. I snoozed in the rain while he went back to check. Panic over. The wallet had been lurking in his luggage. Though we were on a B-road, the road surface became worse and worse after Tollard Royal, and, combined with the gradient, which also became worse and worse, was enough to reduce me briefly to bottom gear. The rain was now so hard that I had only a very impressionistic view of the upland panorama that ought to have provided the reward for the climb. Chris waited stoically at the top, in the minimal shelter of a windblown clump of trees. (Hey, the Micro climbs well, but it's no match for Chris with a hot meal in his sights.)

I was curiously reluctant to ride blind, so stopped to clear my glasses before going down Zigzag Hill (here be hairpins), and again twice more in the 4 km before Shaftesbury. In the town, through the rain sluicing down my spectacles, I vaguely discerned Chris parking his bike against a shopfront.

As I was parking the trike alongside, desperate for hot food and the warmth of a dry cafe, a passerby engaged me in animated conversation about recumbents, oblivious to the rain. I extricated myself as politely as possible and headed for the Robin Hood Cafe. Possibly not very politely at all, on reflection.

We must have presented a pitifully bedraggled spectacle. In the cafe, unbidden, the owner brought us paper towels so we could dry off. As we were wolfing down baked potatoes and showing the teapot who was boss, a vicar entered and approached us diffidently. He'd just joined the local CTC, he said, and had noticed our machines outside: We were welcome to warm ourselves up at the vicarage before setting out again into the icy rain. We thanked him for the offer, but explained that we were on a tight schedule. Shaftesbury might be 150km down, but--aaargh-we didn't actually know how far we were going...

One little advertised advantage of a trike, I pondered gloomily as I swished through puddles in stair-rod rain on the descent from Shaftesbury, is that you don't fall off even when you're shivering convulsively. A school bus passed, children's faces pressed against the windows. We pressed soggily on through Gillingham. The bus passed again, the children waving this time. We veered round small lagoons and minor inland seas. Half the cars we saw seemed to be ancient Austin Maestros-we were definitely in deepest Somerset. Our last, fond encounter with the school bus was in Bruton, which proved a complicated sort of place for somewhere so small. A sign said "Shepton Mallet," so we went that way even though I had a sneaking feeling it wasn't the right road.

It wasn't, but merely (Ha!) meant a slightly longer stretch of nasty A road, with agribusiness lorries whistling past our right ears. Could have been worse. Conceivably. It was now pitch dark and still sheeting with rain, and the traffic was heavy and unpleasant enough to make us opt for an inviting cycle path. Its surface was smooth and wide, without the seemingly compulsory top-dressing of broken glass, lager cans, bits of exhaust system, and old wheel trims. There had to be a catch. There was: It was only a couple of hundred metres long.

Before long, heaving a sigh of relief, we turned off the main road, onto an extremely dark lane. I was almost sure this was the right road. Chris made a brief and fruitless excursion to look for a road name. Never mind, at this point in the proceedings "almost sure" was sure enough. We headed off into the stygian gloom. Naturally, my LightSpin now decided not to work, though the rain was no heavier than the rain we'd been encountering for longer than I cared to remember. This didn't present too much of a problem-I simply switched on the CatEye battery lights mounted on a bracket on the boom. The LightSpin emerged from its sulk after five minutes. (It's worth mentioning that the front-wheel dynamo mount on the prototype Micro is being reconsidered-don't hold this brief failure against the LightSpin. Or the Micro.)

The road surface of the lane became suddenly lunar. Full of dread-I really didn't fancy fixing a p*nct*re in these conditions, thank you-I crashed and banged through water-filled craters. There was a steep and twisting descent to a T junction with the main road. Take it from me, if you really have to plummet down an unfamiliar, unlit wet road to a stop junction, in the dark, with your glasses obscured by rain, mud, and cow dung, do it on a recumbent trike with disc brakes. But, just this once, try not to grin-remember the cow dung...

My teeth felt oddly gritty as we bashed into Wells. I tried not to think too hard about it. We'd covered nearly 200 km-another few minutes and it would be time to look for a control. Once we had 200 km in 12 hours in the bag, we could relax. Well, Chris could relax-I was already relaxed since I was on the trike.

There was a convenient garage in Easton. We stopped, got our cards stamped, and stood in the small shop, chomping flapjacks and drinking suspiciously cheap soft drinks (guaranteed free from all natural ingredients) of the sort liable to leave your tongue glowing in the dark. Never mind, that would make it easier to read the route sheet. A little hyperactivity from the E-numbers wouldn't come amiss, either. A small black cat, imaginatively called Sooty, wound around our feet hoping we might drop the occasional crumb. (He clearly hadn't spent much time around long-distance cyclists.) Thirty km to go...

We were skirting the more challenging bits of the Mendips, but the road involved enough ups and downs to have me visiting both ends of the Micro's gear range. At a couple of points I inadvertently tested Chris's reactions and vocabulary by dropping into a wall-climbing gear when he didn't quite expect it. The weather had cleared. As we contoured round the plateau the lights of Burnham, Wedmore, Bridgwater, and sundry smaller places spangled the blackness of the plain below. With some difficulty, but less than we'd feared, we managed to cross an A38 laden with rush-hour traffic, then threaded our way on quiet lanes, over the occasional entirely gratuitous hill, to the outskirts of Weston-Super-Mare.

Weston has more seafront, occupied by serried ranks of cloned hotels, than the human mind can grasp. Certainly the human mind after 230 rather sodden km on the road. Eventually Chris spotted a neon sign for the S WARD HOTEL, and we checked in.

The hotel wasn't the only thing that was spotted, as I discovered when I got to my room: From squelchy yellow hat to squelchy black overshoes, I was covered in irregular brown blotches. Ah, so that was why the attractive young woman at reception had given me that peculiar look. Misinterpreting it through glasses covered (as I now saw) in irregular brown blotches, I'd put it down to my sheer animal magnetism...

I'll maintain a discreet silence about the AGM and Reunion dinner. Suffice it to say strong drink may have been consumed. As for Weston-Super-Mare itself, did you know that Jeffrey Archer is Lord Archer of Weston-Super-Mare? The prosecution rests its case, m'lud.

The portions of Saturday that weren't spent drinking in one or other den of iniquity, dodging sudden storms, or-only too bracingly-failing to dodge sudden storms were spent in huddled negotiation over maps. Chris and I, Tim Wainright, Pedals, Mark Waters, and the elite Groupe G. Hanna were all going to be heading back in more or less the same direction, so we decided to join forces and rendezvous at 06:30 next morning. Displaying the low cunning of experienced randonneurs, we took the precaution of extracting our machines from the crowded bike garage and parking them accessibly outside the hotel kitchen. Displaying the even lower cunning of the randonneur on a low trike, I locked the Micro to Tim's bike.

Rain and-I'm pretty sure-sea lashed the hotel window all Saturday night, but, to my relief, the rain had ceased by the time my alarm went off. The wind was still whipping waves over the promenade, but I knew that, according to the forecast, it would be a tailwind. On the trike, unfortunately, I wouldn't be able to take advantage of it unless I could find a way to rig up a spinnaker. But I wasn't proposing to quibble.

The 6:30 rendezvous somehow dragged on to 7 or so, which gave the opportunity, eagerly seized, for another rattling squall of rain. A rider on fixed who was facing a 400 km day decided to wait no longer. The Groupe Hanna was missing Danny, a key member, reliably reported to be still slumbering the sleep of Those Who Have Drunk Not Wisely But Too Well, so, in a fine example of esprit de corpse, elected to wait and take turns kicking him smartly in the ribs until he resurfaced.

So it was that Chris, Tim, Pedals, Mark, and I sneaked out of the S WARD HOTEL (Seaward? Ha! I will forever think of it as the Mudward) into a damp and exceedingly blustery morning. It was still raining halfheartedly and, drat and double drat, we'd eaten no breakfast. The randonneur's lot is sometimes a hard one.

A few km down the rather boring and flat road we remembered we'd failed to get any sort of stamp to mark the start of our ride. Never mind. The rain stopped, and the boring flat road swiftly became less boring and less flat, so I could practice nonchalantly falling back (just a little) on the climbs and even more nonchalantly zooming past on descents. I made a token attempt to go for breakfast in a Little Chef-yes, I was that desperate-after an hour or so on the road, but Pedals pointed sternly to the road to Midsomer Norton.

Our route through the Mendips (and for every Mendip there is a Menclimb, of course) was spectacular, though in the dips there lurked water-splashes that allowed me to practise my low trike flood drill, which by now was well honed: Bracing my shoulders against the top of the seat, I would lever my bum off the seat bottom and splash through the flood. Then, O joy unbounded, lower my buttocks into the puddle sloshing around the seat cushion. I made a mental note: Drill drainage holes in seat.

A strange yellow object appeared in the sky. What could it be? Not my hat, surely. Good grief... The sun.

There was a steady climb out of Radstock, long enough for my upright companions to vanish from view. Towards the top I overtook a man trudging glumly beside a mountain bike. He was wearing the kind of waterproofs more normally seen on trawlermen in the North Sea in the middle of January, so was walking rather than parboil himself to death, I presumed. The next few miles were three-wheeled bliss: The beautifully surfaced road snaked gently over sweeping hills. I caught the others at a roadside halt just as Tim was dispensing hot coffee from his flask. Ah, precision timing...

We zomed into Frome, where we encountered the Groupe G. Hanna, making excellent time now they'd managed to kickstart Danny. Tim was holding out the prospect of breakfast in a cafe just beyond Westbury. This was good news, since, despite a couple of energy bars, my stomach was now a black hole and my legs were about to disappear into it. I bonked badly before Westbury, but the sun was shining so brightly I didn't care too much. We passed the Westbury White Horse, cut into the chalk flank of the downs, then, on a minor climb out of Bratton, Pedals flagged me in to the farmhouse cafe.

Picture the scene: A quiet sunlit Sunday morning in the middle of nowhere. A farmhouse nestling against the northern edge of Salisbury Plain (here be Not a Lot, but lots of it) and overlooking the Vale of Pewsey and yet more ancient treeless earthworked hills. A motley but polite rabble of randonneurs arrives and orders the entire menu, twice. As though by secret command, more cyclists emerge from all quarters of the compass, but mostly from Bath. Soon the cafe is heaving with raucous riders. It soon becomes evident why: Our teapot is perpetually refilled, and the food is a) excellent, b) generous, and c) cheap.

We got back under way. It was immediately evident that breakfast had put some oomph back into my legs, and it was easy to hammer along with my wind-assisted companions as the road tracked along the edge of the plain. Indeed, wherever the road surface became less pock-marked I had to consciously throttle back in order to avoid doing that annoying recumbent thing and vanishing effortlessly over the horizon. Until the next climb, of course.

The weather, though still sunny overhead, was showing signs of friskiness around the edges. Sharp showers were marching briskly over distant hills, blurring their outlines. We joined the A338 for Hungerford.

I'm going to have to ride this road again, just to check whether it truly is as wonderful as it seemed that day or whether my perceptions were skewed by a good meal and the Audax endorphins. Though I'd often crossed the A338 on events, I'd not ridden along it before. The tarmac was rough, bad enough for the trike to lose touch with the bikes, and the road climbed in that inconsiderate downland way that saves the steepest bit for the top. But the views... Though the road doesn't get much over 200 metres, it feels like the roof of the world. And the descents... Nyaaah ha ha ha ha ha (Quick, nurse, the screens!).

As the honest citizens of Hungerford went about their business in the rain that Sunday afternoon, they were stunned as a low blue blur streaked past, leaving behind only a faint cackle, fading with a slight but perceptible Doppler effect. As I streaked cackling in the rain past the honest citizens of Hungerford, I scanned them intently in case any might prove on closer inspection to be a fellow randonneur. I spotted Chris at a garage on the A4-the others were missing, believed seduced by a teashop. We had a leisurely snack, then Chris formed a one-man search party and headed out into the rain to round up Tim, Mark, and Pedals.

With the westerly wind helping us (some of us more than others), we bombed along the A4 like a team time trial from the UCI's worst nightmares. Theale saw the parting of the ways as I peeled off to head for home. And start plotting an Easter Arrow? These home-brew rides are rather addictive...

By the way, the performance of the prototype Micro has been impressive enough to persuade me that it will be the ideal mount for Edinburgh-London. Apart from that mile or two of grassy lane (but I can always detour!).

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