Cycling day 12: Penzance to Grampound

Much of today I was following another braid of NCR3. In Hayle I stopped at a cycle shop. My chain was squeaking a bit so I purchased some oil and we chatted a little about OpenCycleMap. I gave a brief demonstration of the freely-downloadable OpenStreetMap data that I have on my Garmin GPS after one of the shop assistants mentioned that he had a Garmin unit.

Passing through Cambourne and Redruth it was clear from the numerous abandoned mine buildings that there was once a rich mining industry here.

At Bissoe I stopped at a bike hire centre beside the cycle route to purchase an ice cream. That’ll be on the map relatively soon as well, once I manage to catch up on the data entry.

Once at Truro I headed out on a reasonably quiet road to meet the A390 trunk road a couple of miles outside town. Unfortunately I needed to follow this road in part to get to my accomodation this evening. I reached the junction with the A390, but ended up turning the wrong way onto it. So after perhaps 1.5 miles of thinking that it’s a little hillier than the contours on my map show I realised my mistake, negotiated crossing to the other side of the road, then headed back in the correct direction.

My planned route took me on a brief diversion via the village of Probus, away from the A390, such that I wouldn’t have to climb a fairly steep hill on the trunk road. I took the wrong turning out of Probus, but ended up discovering a paved bridleway running beside it. Judging from the fading road markings on it it may well have been an earlier alignment of the A390. This brought me back to the main road after a little while, but from here on it was essentially downhill to Grampound.