This was another London Cycling Meetup Group ride. Twelve of us took part.

Wallasea Island is a small islandette (connected by a road across marshland) in an Essex estuary. I'd not been there before. All I knew about it was that there was an RSPB sanctuary there, and it looked pretty, so that seemed as good a reason as any to go there.

Trikes are not brilliant at going uphill, so one feature of our route was three sides of a square to avoid Lark Hill - a very steep hill!

Karen kindly ferried people from Liverpool Street while Rob cycled part of the London to Southend route to meet the group at Wickford. We then assembled at my place for tea.

I'd again slipped the weather gods a fiver, and we were rewarded with perfect weather.

I'd again slipped the weather gods a fiver, and we were rewarded with perfect weather.

The route was mostly rural, and we found some suitably small roads:

We did encounter an unusual number of brain-dead drivers on this ride. Most of them are usually well-behaved in these parts, but perhaps a sunny afternoon straight after a Formula 1 race brings out the frustrated boy racers.

You may hear unfounded rumours of a U-turn, but this was in fact a special detour to the world famous Blue House. This is a very unusual sight in that it is a house that is blue. There are, of course, many houses that are houses, and many blue things that are blue, but something which is simultaneously a house and blue is, you will agree, a sight worth seeing.

You may wonder why there is no photo of this amazing sight in this blog, but it is a long-standing tradition that the Blue House is such a special entity that it is never photographed, and is only permitted to be seen by those who have taken the trouble to make a Special Detour to see it.

Andy had a puncture, so he replaced the tube with a previously-repaired one:

And got all of two feet before his tyre was flat again! We suspect the previous puncture repair wasn't entirely successful ... A borrowed new tube solved the problem.

The original plan was to pay a quick visit to Wallasea Island and then go a further five miles to a lovely pub I know. However, the combination of the Special Detour and the twin tube changes meant that we were a bit behind schedule. I was pretty sure that the pub we were heading for served food all day, but not quite sure enough to risk it with twelve hungry cyclists. David - a fellow trike rider who lives one street away from me - thought there was a pub on Wallasea Island itself, so we decided to take a look.

The island is accessed via a road which I guess technically qualifies as a bridge:

A sign indicated a pub that did home-cooked food, so we followed an unmade road for a mile or so to this:

Complete with a view:

The food was basic but edible, and we enjoyed a leisurely lunch:

Several of the group claimed to have 'accidentally' bought more cider than was intended, so this was duly shared out.

One of the facts of life of trike ownership is that people want to try them. Anna declared it comfortable, and I had to use tyre-levers to extract her from it:

As the five mile run to the intended pub was a dead-end, we skipped that bit and headed home via Stambridge (the lower part of the loop shown at the top).

A final piece of entertainment was that the traffic lights at a 5-way stop didn't register the presence of the bikes. After the lights went through two cycles without giving us a green, I asked a van driver to come alongside us in order to trigger the lights.

A slightly more detailed view of our route is shown below:

I am, by the way, completely hopeless at names, so if I've got any wrong, please let me know!

The next ride is the Isle of Wight Randonee - 62 hilly miles!