Wimpole Estate

And here I thought I was all caught up on my blogging. I will have to back date a couple of my posts since it is already November but I have not finished telling you all about our busy October.

We had one weekend last October when all of us were staying home—no travelling, no visitors. Wait, I should clarify that it was not staying home, but staying in town, so to speak. Although we did not leave the country and did not even leave our “shire”, the kids still wanted to get out of the house for a family bike ride. How could we refuse? We knew these were the last few warm days of the year, so I have decided we should all go to Wimpole Estate and ride our bikes on their trails.

One big dilemma we’ve been having is that we do not have a proper bike rack. Robert has been researching at what would be best for our minivan and five bikes and still has not come up with the answer (we really did not want to stand our bikes on top of the minivan just in case we do want to take our bikes over the English channel).  Anyway, somehow, by taking out our two middle seats and squishing the kids all together, we managed to fit all our five bikes INSIDE the minivan. Not the greatest idea, but it worked and we were off.

Wimpole Estate is a really pretty and fancy estate with a working farm on its territory.

But we were not interested in that this time, our goal was just to bike.  After examining the map of bike trails, we decided to be brave and take the longest one—4.3 mile bike trail.

Everyone is ready to go!

Little did we know! This was not your everyday paved bike trail that we were used to. This turned out to be a woody at first, and then rural route through the grassy and sometimes muddy paths.

Still smiling—this was after our first mile (and where Robert dropped our camera lens cap).

It is hard for me to believe that we did not take any pictures after this stop. Where we too busy pulling Mark on his bike? Or exhausted from telling Katya to not give up? Oh my goodness, they were quite a difficult bunch this time-hahaha. Katya got tired as soon as the grass got too tall AND on top of that she had to walk her bike up the hill (that hill took probably 20 minutes to conquer).  Mark got disenchanted with biking on his own on the second mile. This is the guy who bikes to school every mornings and loves his bike. Part of the way Robert ended up riding his bike and puling Mark’s bike by its handle bar at the same time, and another part of the way, Katya ended up putting Mark on her bike seat and walking the bike. As soon as they started singing songs and eating wild blackberries off the bushes, things started to look up.

The biking champion this time was Alex. He did such a great job! No whining or complaining and we were very grateful for it. He had to wait for us several times as he was so fast on his BMX bike.

Three (or so) hours later we were back to the estate. And despite a few set backs, everyone was still smiling. 

We’ll have to revisit this estate before our National Trust membership runs out…but we’ll leave our bikes at home next time.

Lyana.