Mileage: 6-7 miles, who knows…
Why: Pub crawl to The Cross Keys, via The Star and Garter, to The Jolly Coopers and home
Food: None, but several chaste lemonades with orange juice.
The Cross Keys in Pulloxhill
Following my Mr & Mrs Average post, it occurred to me that the solution to pub-loving, exercise-hating Britain might just be to cycle to the pub, since the 70% who don’t do regular exercise still manage to go to the pub at least once a week. Hence the idea of the two-wheeled pub crawl.
Obviously, the local might just be a bit too close to home, but we all know a pub we’re keen to try out or go to more often, and so we mapped our pub crawl accordingly. Pulloxhill first, where we’d already tried the Chequers, a pub with a shop and a beer-drinking dog, so we headed for the Cross Keys instead. A pub crawl with bikes is really a beer-garden crawl, so I never got to see the inside, but Simon described it as a ‘typical pub-goers pub’, whatever that means. But the beer garden was nice, though empty, despite the sun.
From Pulloxhill, we aimed for Silsoe and the Star and Garter, albeit via a slight detour down a dead end. This rather confirmed that going tee-total had been a good idea, since there was no telling how lost we would have been had we not been sober, though at least we were rewarded with some lovely views over the fields.
Star and Garter, Silsoe
The Star and Garter is one of our regular haunts and just plain lovely. It’s good pub grub inside, but the beer garden is the main draw; sunny, relaxed and with suitable amount of life passing by to keep us entertained. Thus we passed another orange lemonade in perfect contentment.
Orange juice and cycling turned out not to be a great combination, however, so there was really no other choice but to make another stop at the Jolly Coopers in Wardhedges. The beer garden here is pleasant enough, but the smokers have been given the best spot with a few tables at the front, so we snatched their domain for a final drink since they were nowhere in sight.
I’m not sure that the above quite qualifies for a pub crawl, being non-alcoholic and all, but it certainly was a great way to find sunny spots to while away a warm summer’s evening. Nor does it qualify as exercise, I suppose, but it’s still being active, isn’t it? And couch-potato England is certainly in need of finding new ways of getting from A to B.
Hmm, I wonder what the drink-cycling limit is…
