Day 15: Who 'Wold' have thought it!!

Oxford, Oxfordshire to Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire (via Gloucestershire)
76.3 miles (821.9 miles cumulatively)

What a witty pun with which to title toady's blog don't you think! That's how much I'm learning about Geography now - that I can even make witty witticisms with places I cycle through!
Anyway, after saying goodbye to Sarah at the station in the morning, I set off on a day of discovery (the A40), a day of wonder (it seems that there are no such things as Bank Holidays in the Cotswolds, every town and village was heaving!) a day of climbs and descents (up to and away from Stow-on-the-Wold) and a day of becoming more and more frustrated at being signposted one way when I could blatantly tell that the direction I should be going in was in completely the other way!
I make it sound though like I didn't have a good cycle today - in fact, it was quite the obvious - I had a great day and for once, the last 10 miles were not in fact the hardest. They normally feel about the same as what I imagine it would feel like to be repeatedly beaten with a weighted sock, and yet today, I hit a railway path into Stratford and with the wind behind me, fair flew in. Brilliant.
It was on this tow path though when an event took place that I would like to focus upon for the end of this blog. (I make it sound far more interesting than it actually was, but isn't that the key to making people read on!)
The railway path had a gate, of sorts, every 3 miles or so (for safety, or some other type of silly reason) and when I was approaching the third one (I think it was the third, but that really isn't the important point here) I saw a woman struggling to open the gate. She had a young child bawling his eyes out, she was dragging a scooter and frankly she didn't have enough arms to deal with everything that was going on. Her husband (I assume - He could have been a complete stranger for all I know) was casually wandering up and making no effort to help so I saw my moment to be a hero (ok, hardly heroic I guess, holding a gate open to, let's say, saving a family from a burning building, but there's a time and a place for everything, and as Tesco say, every little helps!) - I skidded to a halt, flung the back wheel round to allow myself to manoeuvre into position to hold the gate, leant forward onto my handlebars to support myself, and managed to catch the gate before it fell into her for the third time.
She thanked me heartily, and I cycled on, with that warm feeling inside of just having made a difference to someones day when I looked down to see what speed I was doing and realised that in my efforts to support myself on my handlebars, I had inadvertently cleared all the data from my cycle computer and was going to have to reset the whole thing again! Bang goes the warm feeling.
Oh well. If there's ever a great leveller, it's cycle England!