Hills and dead ends

Just a little gem of information for any of you who might one day find yourselves in a similar position...

Let's say you decide to go for a bike ride, and you look carefully at the map and think you've found a good route. You set off purposefully. All is going well - the sun is shining on the mountains, the river flows majestically alongside, you marvel at the various other sights and sounds of nature. You jolly along for a couple of kilometres and feel at one with the world. Then the asphalt peters out and becomes a stony track. Not one to be easily deterred, you carry on, although you can't help but notice that your chosen path is ascending sharply. Eventually you have to get off and push, and it is normally at this stage that you pass someone on their way down (who, by the way, is never on a bike but is wearing stout boots and carrying a stick). Invariably this person will give you a strange stare. You tut and continue, as staring is a national pastime here and you've become hardened to it. Then you reach a stile and have to lug your bike over it. You scratch yourself, and your bike, in several places. The path gets steeper and narrower. Still you persevere as you know the path is part of a circular route and can't realistically get much worse. It is at this point that (a) you land in a field of young, energetic bulls, no path to be seen and a worrying lack of electricity in the fence (b) you nearly fall off a cliff or (c) you turn a corner and realise that even you cannot drag a 30 kg bike up a vertical shale mountain goat's track. So you turn around and wearily go down again, trying desperately to stop your bike wrenching itself free and careering down the hill. At the bottom, you see the hiker from earlier, sitting calmly on a bench chewing a brezl (pretzel). They acknowledge you with a mixture of disdain and amusement. You cycle back home, looking as if you've been dragged through a hedge backwards.

Don't be me. When you are accosted by the questioning stare, pretend you have dropped forgotten something (or whatever), turn yourself around and find yourself a nice, flat road. It's really not worth the hassle.