November flowers

The mountain bike route over the Sallandse Heuvelrug has a number of features in its favour. Cowberry One is that it starts close to where some friends of ours live.  Another is that it has some of the best quality heathland in the country.  The flowers on the left are not the more common bilberry (which has purple fruit) but the cowberry (which as well as red berries has evergreen leves) is less common. It is of course typical of our warm autumn that they are still flowering now, when they 'ought' to have finished last month. There are also all sorts of other rare birds and plants living there.  The disadvantage of that, for the mountainbiker is that this means that a lot of the area is protected and that you can only cycle along the official route.  That also means that the tracks near to car parks for walkers are very busy with dogs, push, chairs, people spread out all over the path, etc.  Definately a route to be prefered in some nice rainy weather to scare off the crowds. Although some of the route is along straight cycle paths, there are some nice stretches of singletrack and it does include 280 of elevation.