Day 13: Castle Eden to High Leven (Yarm) : 27 miles, overcast, wet, cold

The main achievement for me today was getting the back wheel sorted - travelling less than 30 miles will simply mean I have more to do tomorrow in order to get to York. Hopefully the weather will improve a little as it was desperately dreary today. 
The street lights were still on in Blackhall Colliery on the Durham coast at 10.00 this morning as I travelled to an industrial estate alongside Peterlee. Unfortunately the bright lights and sounds of Strawberry Cycles here weren't able to help - they specialise in MTB (mountain bikes) with either much longer or shorter spokes than mine.
After limping down to Stockton on Tees, I eventually managed to get the bike back to normally with the input of Doug at Halfords; Doug was also a great source of knowledge on cycling in the North Yorkshire Moors. At least getting to Stockton enabled me to have a look at the Infinity Bridge that I saw win the Supreme Award at the Structural Awards (designed by Expedition Engineering - I love the graphics for the people on their website- led team) in the National History Museum last year.
On the positive side of things in Stockton the cycle routes were well marked and plentiful - it is a little unfortunate that the northern end of the bridge approach paths are incomplete and some of the light fittings are already corroding.

Infinity Bridge in Stockton-on-Tees opened 2009 and cost £15m to build. It is for pedestrian and cycling use. The bridge is a dual, tied arch bridge or bowstring bridge. It has a pair of continuous, differently-sized structural steel arches with suspended precast concrete decking and one asymmetrically placed river pier. The tapering arches are fabricated from weathering steel plate box sections. The arches both bifurcate within the spans to form a double rib over the river pier. A reflex piece between the two arches holds them together making the two arches one continuous curve. No other bridge is known to have quite the same design. 

From Wikipedia... There were more than 1,000 entries to the competition but this was slimmed down to a shortlist of five. The successful competition design was by Expedition Engineering and Spence Associates.

The subsequent design was led by Expedition Engineering assisted by Arup Materials, Balfour Beatty Regional Civil Engineering, Black and Veatch, Bridon, Cambridge University,Cleveland Bridge UK, Dorman Long Technology, Flint & Neill (checkers), Formfab, GCG, GERB, Imperial College, RWDI, Spence Associates, Speirs & Major, Stainton, and William Cook while White Young Green were project managers.

 Apparently the Old Mill B&B that I'm staying at tonight has a hot tub outside - I'm going to pass on that!