Travels with my Bike

We spend a night in Hadleigh, Essex, staying with friends of our friend Fudge. We’ve met Kevin and Sally before – once in Australia, and again last year when we celebrated Fudge’s 50th with a ride up Alpe D’Huez in France.

Today we head out with Kevin and Fudge, to explore some of Kevin’s favourite cycle routes.

Last year when we rode up Alpe D’Huez, it was a group of eight, with four of us (Kevin, Fudge, Neil and I) on traditional bikes, and another four on eBikes. Today is a reunion of the Alpe D’Huez leg-power crew. We enjoy sunshine, lunch at The Shepherd and Dog, torrential rain and ice cream on our near 60km loop. It is great to ride the routes we’ve seen Kevin post on Strava (even Belton Way in the rain) and to enjoy a ride without heavy panniers. Shame about the rain, but that’s England for you.

Stats for the day

• Distance travelled: 58.9km
• Climb: 442m
• Moving time: 2:56:07
• Average speed: 20.1km/h
• Average temperature: 18C
• See our ride on Strava.

We thought it would be fun to ride across London. Our train from Bath arrives at Paddington Station; we need to get to Fenchurch Street Station. Taking the bikes on the tube in the middle of the day sounds like hell; we choose to ride. I think we could have a lovely time, riding through the parks and having lunch near some London icon.

The reality is when we get off the train it is raining. We eat mediocre food at the station waiting for the rain to stop. We do ride through parks: through Hyde Park and Green Park, and we stop to wave at Buckingham Palace. Neil and I are quite cool about it, but the bikes have never been here before and get a little royal struck.

The Buckingham Palace detour leaves us with no good way to get to Fenchurch Street, so we ride through the guts: along the Strand, take a GPS-oops out and back on Waterloo Bridge, pass my favourite lions at Trafalgar Square, along Fleet Street, and, just before we reach Fenchurch Street, we sashay past St Paul’s Cathedral.

St Paul’s has a special little place in my heart. Once, a long time ago, in a life far, far away, I was part of a little band of techies from a Californian startup, who had the arrogance to claim the world’s fastest Autocad, measured by how fast we could render a line drawing of St Paul’s Cathedral using a unique 1980s combination of processor and graphics cards and Autocad release something-very-early. Whether we did have the world’s fastest I don’t know, but I tell you, I saw that cathedral being drawn hundreds, if not thousands of times, all in the name of work.

Now I dodge London buses and barely have the chance to take a peek at St Paul’s, but that’s OK, because the line drawing is etched into my brain.

Fenchurch Street doesn’t come soon enough, but we are finally there. We are later than planned, and have to brave a crowded train heading out of London at around 3:30pm, destination Essex. Doing this kind of commute with loaded touring bikes is not something I would recommend.

Stats for the day

• Distance travelled: 10.7km
• Climb: 47m
• Moving time: 57:15
• Average speed: 11.2km/h
• Average temperature: 23C
• See our ride on Strava.

In my time I’ve done a little budget travel. Never the two-minute-noodles-every-day-for-dinner kind of budget travel, but certainly the $10-per-night-backpacker, cook-in-the-shared-kitchen, do-your-own-laundry-spread-it-out-everywhere-to-dry kind of travel. Back in those days I didn’t stay at castles, though I would have liked to.

No matter how you travel, there are things you need to take care of. After yesterday’s downpour we have two main things to do: Neil’s brakes, and a pile of wet clothes and shoes that haven’t dried overnight.

Remember, we’re staying at a posh place. We try to find somewhere unobtrusive to take care of the bike repairs and get shoes and clothes dry. We try the castle garden, but realise we are getting in the way of others who are coming out to enjoy the gardens and take pictures, so we relocate to the car park.

Neil sets up at one end to work on his bike, and I spread the washing out over what could be a several-hundred-year-old wall, feeling very much like a backpacker, and expecting to be moved along at any time.

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Most visitors to Europe spend a good deal of time viewing impressive old places of worship, places that date back centuries and which hold their own special stories. We view the old churches and cathedrals from the outside, often lit at night; from the inside, marvelling about the architecture and appointments; we sometimes climb steep, spiralling staircases to gain views from high vantage points on towers or domes. Very few of us ever visit the churches in the way they are intended: by attending a service.

This Abbey calls to me. Its faded grandeur, obvious chequered history, and small town proximity call to me in a way that the grander cathedrals in more touristy towns do not. I resolve to attend the 9am service. Neil decides to come along with me.

I think Neil’s mother is doing a happy dance in heaven right now. I can already hear her saying “I knew that girl would be good for him!” …

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So what is a wold, anyway? Cotswolds. Stow-on-the-wold. All my life I’ve heard of the Cotswolds and thought nothing of it, other than it being another of those curious English names. Now that I am “on the wold” in Stow, I’m intrigued.

I used to think it was quite smart back in high school, to start essays with a dictionary definition. Then that got a bit old, and I’m a now turned off when people do that. But, for wold, I had to turn to a dictionary. (I wish I could say I turned to the Oxford English Dictionary, but I’m not a subscriber, so I had to make do with a definition from another source.)

 (in Britain) a piece of high, open uncultivated land or moor

I know I rode uphill yesterday. I’m not too sure about the uncultivated bit, but I guess way back when, in the Norman days or earlier it may well have been true.
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When I was a young girl, I used to devour Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers books, set in a fictional girls boarding school in Cornwall, where on occasion a girl would be “sent to Coventry”. This meant that she would be shunned by the others, but I never understood the reference to Coventry, as the only Coventry I knew was a yellow property on the Monopoly board.

Coventry is a city we’ve been told we could happily miss, but as it lies on today’s route between the Abbey and Stow-on-the-wold, we ride through the outskirts of town, through a rather insalubrious housing estate. I don’t really know if we’ve seen the best or the worst of the place, but we leave it behind fairly quickly.

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Rain. It seems to be an integral part of an English summer. It is being particularly English summery in the wet sense this morning, so we linger over breakfast, and wait, hoping that the weather will clear.

Melbourne is a much more busy place in the morning, with people going about their business, taking children to school, and boarding buses to head to Derby. In Harpur’s a young couple are enjoying a champagne breakfast. It is her birthday. He drinks beer while eating his fruit and yoghurt; champagne is obviously not to his taste.

The rain dies down a little, and we load up the bikes and get moving. It is not a long day today, and we have a special destination tonight: an old abbey, in a park in the middle of apparent nowhere, just east of Coventry. …

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You meet all types while on the road. Some inspire you. Some don’t.

We eat breakfast this morning with a couple who live only 30 minutes up the road. They’ve been given a night at the B&B as a gift. We chat about travel, and how they’ve been to Australia, but wouldn’t go again.

“We’re too old now for adventure,” says she, who is probably less than ten years older than me. I gamely keep eating my  vegetarian sausage and nod and smile.  Push me off a cliff now if that’s where I’m headed. …

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We rode from Edinburgh to Bath. This map shows our route.

Our stats for the ride:

• Distance: 732km
• Total climbing: 7544m
• Riding days: 12

The ride after a rest day (or two) is a different beast to the ride just before a rest day. We’ve had two days in York, resting (apart from the 275 stairs to the top of the cathedral!), we are feeling fresh, and so are our bikes, after a bit of a spa and adjustment at Cycle Haven at York Station who have done a marvellous job of cleaning road grit from the chains and adjusting gears that have been a little off for the past few days.

It is particularly easy, as we take a train from York to Sheffield, an hour long trip that cuts a full day’s riding, and gets us into the Peak District more quickly. The only difficulties we have are getting the bikes on and off during the very short stops the train makes.

A grey-ish day in York becomes a blue-sky day as we head up the hill out of Sheffield toward Bakewell. I am sure that Neil told me it was uphill all the way, so I am prepared for it. The climb is gradual as we leave Sheffield, and becomes more steep on the outskirts of the city, but it is manageable now with my newfound verve.

At about 9km into the ride we stop for some lunch. Three cheese and caramelised onion quiche they called it. Oh my goodness,  it was more like a cheese tart with onion, gooey and runny with cheese and just the right thing to get in your  tummy for a climb. …

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