Princes St. Shandwick, Haymarket and Dalry are all a treacherous jigsaw of tyre troughs to get stuck in and packed snow/ice in random bumpy places to throw.
Made it too! 6 miles from Meadows to South Gyle in 50 minutes instead of usual 25. Haymarket by far and away the worst part of my ride. Spytfyre's description above pretty much sums it up. You point the front where you want to go then the back hits one of those ruts and just begins to slide. Almost came of fa couple of times coming down Grove Street / Morrison Street /Haymarket. Got off and pushed across the junction with Morrison Link / Torphicen Street as the criss-crossing tyre tracks were impassable.
Got quite adept at cycling with one foot unclipped on the pannier side and ready to stop my fall (figure if I fell I was going to go with the direction of gravity) and the other doing the pedalling.
I could be wrong, but it really doesn't look like the surfaces have been gritted.
Slow but steady pace along Roseburn / Corstorphine / St Johns road. The "dry" slush powder was OK and managed about 12 mph. However wherever there's a junction it becomes treacherous for the reasons described above. Pulled in a couple of times to let busses past.
Took one look at South Gyle cut-through, thought better of it and continued up past St Augustines / Forrester high schools to Bankhead and into the South Gyle estate on the main road. Last bit along South Gyle Broadway was fine apart from the scrotal sack in a range rover who quite literally sat on my back wheel and ran his engine in high revs. I just held my nerve and carried on my line at my pace(which was 16mph so not even too shabby). I couldn't prevent myself hurling a torrent of abuse at him when he barged past with about 3 inches or room, much to the amusement of the pedestrians.
Pulled in at the last roundabout to assist pushing a Porsche that had got stuck trying to get into a car park, back out onto the main road. Pushed 2 wee front-wheel drive cars into the work car park all by myself (gatehouse guard obviously hadn't made it in) only for one of them to wind down his window and ask "where do I go now?", to which I replied "why, where are you trying to get to?", "UPS", "Back out the way you came then, this is <insert name of financial institution here>"
8 inches of snow, enough to stand the laden tourer up in. Got a couple of photos to flickr-ise later.
) is on my list of "things to buy for the tourer". Particularly seeing as I have a yellow thermos :)
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