Cycle ride to Stockton

This morning and afternoon Sue and I went on a 'little' cycle ride along the River Tees from North Ormesby to Stockton-on-Tees (a full name which nobody uses - it's Stockton). The round trip was about 23km (14.29 miles), with no major hills and only light winds (although the wind was picking up a bit on the way back).
However, because I have hardly done any exercise at all over the last five months, while I have been on chemotherapy, I have got really out of condition and found it pretty hard the whole way. Now that I am home, I am exhausted and  it was a challenge even walking up the stairs when I got into the house. Sue, on the other hand, has been training for a long cycle ride in the summer (Middlesbrough to Norfolk over five days), is now much fitter than me and found that she kept having to stop to let me catch up.
Most of our journey today was on a lovely riverside cycle/foot path and so as well as getting good exercise and fresh air, we saw quite a lot of wildlife and wildflowers. Common Terns, delicate gull-like birds, fished along the river. Many songbirds, including Whitethroats, Blackcaps, Wrens, Goldfinches and Blackbirds, serenaded us as we went along. Surprisingly we didn't see any Grey Herons, but we did get a nice look at a Little Egret. This lovely white bird in the heron family has black legs but bright yellow feet which usually stand out very clearly when it flies. Before 1989 a Little Egret would have been a rare sight anywhere in England. At that time they started to be seen in significant numbers in Dorset, on the south coast, and since then they have spread amazingly, are now breeding at many sites and you could see one almost anywhere in England.
On the way home we stopped in at the Tees Valley Wildlife Trust's nature reserve at Portrack Marsh where we watched a Kestrel catch a small rodent, lots of Sand Martins hunting insects and two powder-blue and black dragonflies called Broad-bodied Chasers (https://british-dragonflies.org.uk/species/broad-bodied-chaser). These were two males, which can be quite territorial, and as you might expect from the name, they were chasing each other.
The grass verges along our route were a mass of colour - pink Rest-harrow and Musk Mallow, yellow Bird-s-foot Trefoil, St. John's Wort and Ribbed Melilot, and white Ox-eye Daisies.

The orange of my hi-viz top clashes slightly with the red of the Common Poppies