Coffee and Cake Ride #1

Coffee and Cake Ride 

Our latest adventure was less of an adventure and more of a civic duty, a quiet, slow ambling 35 mile social ride to Whitehaven and back as we start our quest to try all the local coffee shops and tea rooms to find Cumbria's Best Coffee and Cake Stop in the World! 

We started from Cockermouth and headed out towards Lorton, repeating some of the world famous Fred Whitton route, driven on by not being 60+ miles into the UK's most difficult sportive and also by the thought of coffee and a cake whilst riding we set about our scoring system for rating our coffee break sport. 

The most important thing of course was the rating system, rather than the usual star rating system, we of course settled on chainrings. I don't know about you, but when we think bike rides and cakes, we don't think stars, we think chainrings. 

Anyway, back to the ride; as we rode through Loweswater I realised I was in a much better mood than I was 6 days earlier when competing in the Fred, Loweswater is a beautiful place and the scenery, as you can see from the photos round there is amazing. A fact that completely passed me by last week (you can read about that in my previous blog) when I was tired and grumpy. 

We headed from Loweswater towards Ennerdale and continued to discuss how we were actually going to rate our coffee stops (by coffee stops we also mean tea stops). The categories we came up with and a brief explanation are as below; 

1 - Seat Comfort: The first thing to test after a hard graft in the saddle is how refreshing, relaxing, comforting and tender the visited establishments chairs are to our weather hardened and weary buttocks.

2 - Bike Friendliness: The next thing to consider is how bike friendly the place is, this isn't just about having somewhere to leave our bikes while we go inside, but it's also about staff friendliness too, if someone fails to ask how our ride is going or laughs at our stumbling around on a polished floor in cleats while wearing ridiculous lycra, that's going to knock your score down too. 

3 - Cakes: When it comes to riding around the Lake District tasting cakes at different places, what kind of a service would we be providing to you the reader if we didn't taste as many cakes as we possibly could... this one is for you Cumbria. 

4 - Cake Choice: Very important this one, we at Go Cumbria love a good cake, but we also love starring at a choice of cakes panicking about what to choose. This category should act as a good moderator for anywhere that offers the worlds best Lemon Drizzle Cake with Ice Cream Dressing... but nothing else. 

5 - Coffee / Tea: Much like the cake tasting, the importance of a good brew should not be underestimated mid ride. By the power of Greyskull a boost of warm caffeine can be the difference between cycling home or calling the wife in tears for an emergency evacuation. 

Overall Rating: A summary of the above with a max score of five Go Cumbria Chainrings

From Ennerdale we headed West, over Steel Brow towards Whitehaven. Our mid ride coffee and cake stop, the first of our cake and coffee tour of Cumbria began at Annas, on the Whitehaven Marina. 

Coffee and Cake Review - Annas Whitehaven:

...........

1 - Seat Comfort: There was a range of seating available in Anna's, including some old theatre seats.  The café was pretty busy so we ended up on some bar stools, bar stools are not always the most comfortable on weary buttocks.  We've given it 2 chain rings.

2 - Bike Friendliness:  You could prop your bikes up outside and wherever you sat inside you could still view your bike, which is good, but you couldn't lock them up if you wanted to. We've given it 2 chain rings.



3 - Cakes: Had an excellent Rocky Road very good! We've given it 4 chain rings.



4 - Cake Choice: Unfortunately a poor cake choice, just the Rocky Road and a gluten-free Chocolate cake.  We like a wide range of cakes to choose from.  We've only given this a 1 chain ring.



5 - Coffee / Tea: We both had an Americano, which we both agreed was really good. We've given it 4 chain rings.



Overall Rating: Overall we've given Anna's in Whitehaven 3 chain rings.

From Whitehaven, refreshed and full of Rocky Road we headed back out onto the road and back to Cockermouth, the ride back was shorter than we initially planned, Mrs Paddy was off out dirty boozing Saturday night so we had to get back fairly sharpish as not to incur her wrath... Also it was Eurovision night and I didn't want to miss a thing.

If you have any suggestions of any coffee and cake stops we should make let us know, we are always willing participants!

Paddy and Owen