Day 7 - Thornbury to Fownhope (50 miles)

Sunday, May 29, 2011 (50 miles)
Even the Tour de France riders have rest days. Anybody know where I can get a hold of some EPO? Well I am back in the saddle and it may feel like I’ve got thistles in my shorts and rubber legs but I do appreciate how lucky I am to be able to do this trip.
Today has been an amazing ride; Thornbury, Severn Bridge, Chepstow, Tintern Abbey, English Bicknor, Wye Valley, the lanes, and to finish with, picture perfect Fownhope. Another amazing thing is how I can amuse myself for hours listening to the monologue running through my head (luckily). For example, as I approached the Severn Bridge I remembered the last time I crossed the Severn. It was 1993 and a huge bumble bee hit the windscreen of my Citroen Dyane and came into the car through the open roof. It squirmed on my lap all the way across as I weaved over both lanes trying to get it off without being stung.
IF England was a land of perfect country cottages, South Wales is a land of ancient cars that came too close to my pannier. It was raining and misty when I crossed the Severn and rode into Chepstow. I parked the bike there and had a quick look round and a cup of tea then headed a few miles along the road to Tintern Abbey before turning up the lanes into the hills above the Wye Valley. The River Wye is a very popular canoeing place - take note, Les - because it is shallow and it meanders and is very pretty. My lanes followed it closely which meant nice gradients with plenty to look at. Even when I couldn’t see the water I could hear the canoeists chatting quietly to each other; everyone seemed to be having a nice day today. With three miles to go before my B&B at Fownhope, an old Vauxhall truck came up behind me. I stopped to let it past. It did then it stopped right in front of me, causing me to stop too. A shaggy-haired old man got out and asked where Foy was. I showed him on the map and asked if he was going there. “No,” he said, “Do you know that MP, that Mandelson? Well I reckon he’s got a place there ‘cos he calls himself Lord Mandelson of Foy,” then he got in his truck and drove away.
Today’s B&B is top banana and I’ve had a great chat with Tony about EVERYTHING. FYI Mandelson doesn’t have a place there, he just uses the name.

A stormy Severn Bridge

Good thing to do with straw bales

I am now in the Green Man pub eating asparagus soup and pasta with artichokes. It’s almost like being on holiday.

Rest Day, Thornbury (6 miles)

After finishing late last night and doing a long 72 miles I asked my B&B lady if I could stay here in Thornbury an extra day and get rested and organised again. I posted a half-pannier of extra kit I didn't use home (Carol would be proud), booked a few accommodation venues in advance and did some washing etc. I even got my bike power-washed at Tesco and it looks braw again. Nighty night.

Day 6 - Bridgwater to Thornbury

Friday, May 27, 2011 (72 miles, seven of them “lost“ miles)
Sometimes it all goes pear shaped. Take today for example. Daily chores after a ride are to wash out cycling kit, have a shower, eat tea, find accommodation for the next day, tidy the panniers, buy food for the next ride, label the photos, write up the log and post it and check emails if there is an internet connection. If you finish cycling late or have a very chatty B&B host, time is very tight in the evenings and I haven’t made it into bed before 11.30pm one single time. I have been getting progressively more disorganised for the last couple of days and this morning I didn’t get out of Bridgwater until 10.20am. I usually start at 9am but 8.30am would be preferable.
The first 20 miles passed flatly at a good speed and before I knew it I was at the bottom of Cheddar Gorge with all the other grockels. I cycled slowly through the busy retail village where tickets to the caves could be bought and started to climb up through it. I could hear ghostly echoes of rock climbers encouraging each other up the walls of the gorge. At Compton Martin I failed to get to the pub in time for lunch and instead, picnicked by the village pond, sharing my cheese roll with a duck the size of a Fiat 500.
It was nice to see water again at Chew Lake and I had the road to myself until I got to the “Chews“, Chew Stoke and Chew Magna, where the school traffic choked up all the streets at 4pm. I headed back into the lanes after this. These are good because there is very little traffic and they undulate so the riding is more interesting, even if you have to push a bit. I emerged from the maze of lanes at Saltford where I joined the cycle path between Bristol and Bath. I got lost getting off the cycle path (I know!)


Cheesy Cheddar



the gorge



It was getting late now though. The route I am following is a Cyclists Touring Club one which requires micro-navigation on a map which is almost too small-scale to do this. I have to stop at every junction to double check the route as back-tracking is soul destroying. So it was 7pm when I went in to a pub for tea and I still had 20 miles to go, all on lanes. There was quite a bit of pushing in these lanes and it was getting dark by the time I got seriously lost in tiny Nibley. I had been phoning the B&B lady to keep her in the loop and it was with great relief that her torch and mine finally locked beams at 9.30pm.

Rest day tomorrow….

Day 5 - South Molton to Bridgewater

Thursday, May 26, 2011 (50 miles)
I left South Molton in heavy rain and strong SW winds. I felt like a fledgling leaving a nest. Mr and Mrs Colman had been great hosts in a lovely house, even putting my water bottles in the fridge and drying my rinsed out cycling clothes. Mr Colman told me not to go the way I was going “because they used it for the King of the Mountains competition in the Tour de France”.
It took an one hour and 20 minutes to do the first six miles. Normally I would do about 14 miles on a flat surface. Then I got on to Exmoor. I passed sign at a cattle grid saying “Slow down, Exmoor ponies” but I didn’t see any. The wind was howling though and I imagined the ponies barrelling across the moor, head over heels, in front of it. Crossing Exmoor was dramatic in this weather but there was a hedge which stopped the worst of the wind. It ran out with three miles to go so I put on my woolly hat from North Ronaldsay and my jumper and went for it. Near the end the rain stopped and a single ray of sun burst through. The larks immediately threw themselves into the sky and sang their heads off; I may have looked like Kenneth More in The 39 Steps but this was fantastic. I was still cold though and looked forward to a cup of tea at Withypool. The teashop was shut. As I sat at its outside table, two gamekeepers in green tweed pulled up in an ancient Land Rover. They looked like they had just driven in from the 19^th century and were just as unsmiling as the Glamis lot. I did get coffee (and scones with clotted cream and jam) in Winsford 4 miles further on though. It had thatched cottages, a real ford and Ernest Bevin was born there.
Next came the Summerway Hare Path which was another huge push. After that, things were a littler easier to Raleigh Cross Inn where I had a proper hot lunch. I passed a straggled out group of walkers doing five marathons in five days to raise money for injured soldiers coming home from Afghanistan.
I made it into my top gear for the first time after this but soon after Bishop’s Lydeard I started climbing up into the Quantocks. There were a few isolated farms but not as we know them. These were all from the 17^th century and had been restored to mint condition, an affluent place indeed. I was following lanes too narrow for anything more than a car and the canopy overhead made them tunnels. The wind was whipping the branches back and forward and the sun dappling on the road was quite hypnotic. I had time to notice these things ’cos the hill was so steep I could barely move my bike up it. After an hour and a half of this I got to the top, completely knackered.

Exmoor. Brrrr.

A Quantocks farm

The bike found it’s own way to Bridgewater and my B&B, luckily, my first big town, with flats and Asda and everything.

Day 4 Middle of Nowhere to South Molton

Wednesday, May 25, 2011 (42miles)
Carol and I stuck together until we left Cornwall and entered Devon then we parted at a fork in the road, her to carry on with her plans and me to resume mine, which would take me north more quickly. I was sad to see her go because she told great stories in a great accent and was good company. Now it was just me and me again I could pay more attention to my surroundings. On the A388, I came up a 16% gradient to a view with no towns at all in it. Then it got silly. I went down a 25% gradient. I mean, one of the steepest roads in the UK is only 5% steeper at 30%! I mean, I thought I was going over the handlebars every second and I was practically sitting on the rear mudguard and managed to stretch my arms to two metres long to reach the handlebars! OMG!!!! And did I mention the 20% hill to climb up on the other side?
Now I am in South Molton. I arrived in a similar state to John Mills in Ice Cold in Alex but an ace B&B has cheered me up. It has an ensuite Jack Russell!

Day 3 - Newquay to the Middle of Nowhere

Tuesday, May 24, 2011 (57miles)
Newquay hindered my blog because a small part of it went on fire which caused much of the town centre to be closed and evacuated last night. Nonetheless, better late etc.
Carol and I left Newquay at 9am, up a hill. Cycling in Cornwall is like sledging in Dundee. The long trudge up is rewarded by a wee thrill down. The hills got progressively more ridiculous over the 12 miles to Padstow but this was Cornwall as you would imagine it; a string of surfing beaches in deep coves around which picturesque villages had grown like roses.
Padstow is the home of the National Lobster Hatchery. Oh yeah, and Rick Stein’s got a chippie there. It was mobbed. People are such lemmings. Television is so powerful. Carol and I ate Cornish ice cream at the harbour where yachts jostled for space. It is indeed bonny. Then we left the sea for the last time and turned inland to follow the camel river trail for 18 miles, stopping to admire the Archimedes screw at the Padstow sewage treatment plant.
The trail was very busy with families out cycling and, unusually, mobility scooterists. Even under the darkest tree lined stretches, bike renters would come thundering along. I prefer to have sky above me but the trail certainly smoothed things out for a while. We bought food in the Wadebridge Lidl to avoid an afternoon bonk (it’s a cycling term; look it up!) but I bonked anyway and had to consume some emergency sandwiches and wait for them to work their magic. The trail ended at Camelford and we climbed again, this time right up on to Bodmin Moor where we cycled over a WWII airfield so atmospheric we expected Spitfires to land on the road.

Padstow

Carol Parker, ace bike companion

It’s all a bit of a blur after that. We swooped and plunged in the narrow lanes until 7.30pm until we found our farm house B&B in a very remote location, possibly the same one Terry Waite was held in for five years, where the conversation-starved hostess kept us chatting almost until bedtime.

Day 1 - Penzance to Penzance

Sunday, May 22, 2011

I left the hostel at 9am and cycled to Land’s End (yay!) via Newlyn and Mousehole and came back via St Buryan. At Newquay all the people had been abducted by aliens. Except the joggers. The aliens left the joggers. There’s a lesson for us all there. St Michael’s Mount was visible through a slight haze and a single fishing boat, very neat, was leaving the harbour.
There were no mice at all at Mousehole, just a lot of people hanging around the paper shop. On my way out of Mousehole a fox dropped out of the long grass on the verge and crossed the road in front of me without a single sound then vanished into the potato shaws on the other side.
Just after Mousehole I passed through a place called Paul.
The lanes are absolutely beautiful. Many of the dykes had pink daisies growing out of them. All the flowers are out - white hawthorn that looked like it was heavy on the branches, pink campion, purple vetch and yellow gorse. And the smell of wild garlic all the way; plenty for Lydia’s excellent soup. The birds were shouting to be heard above the wind.
Arriving at the three mile marker from Land’s End I was pleased to note there was a giant saltire in the sky above it. It had been drawn by the jet planes and made me feel quite welcome.
The lanes are lovely but suddenly plunge away round hairpin bends. I had to make an emergency stop for a chubby grey squirrel that couldn’t decide how to get out of the way quickly enough. It’s hard to enjoy the downhills ‘cos you know there is a price to be paid. Some Good Things About Uphills are: you get to have a good look at your knees. When did you last do that eh? You get to have a good look at the flowers. You get to have a good look at the road kill. The most interesting road kill is in Sicily (dogs, possums, snakes) but Land’s End offered a snakey thing and a lizardy thing.
When I got to Land’s End there was a sign. It said “Private Property. This is a private road. Please park in the designated car park only.” None of your Land Reform Act nonsense here. See, this is why Scotland needs to keep voting SNP. The designated car park cost £4 of course but bikes were able to go through the tollbooth for free. Land’s End has a shopping village. I don’t know what it sells as I wasn’t tempted into any shops except for a cup of tea (and maybe a Cornish pasty). There were plenty of people here although the wind was blasting away at force 47 on the Beaufort scale and some people’s hair appeared to have been blown clean off. The sea was amazingly wild and walkers were gamely setting off along the coastal path.
The Famous Sign is behind a fence which keeps the public 10 feet away from it. Honest. If you want your picture taken right beside it it’ll cost £7.95 for a 7x5 print. The couple next to me were telling their wee dog to “Stay” so they could snap him in front of the sign but every time the man framed his shot the dog took a few fairy steps towards him and spoiled it. They kindly snapped me there too. On the wall close to the sign there are two plaques to cyclists killed while doing the End to End. One was on his 12^th when it happened.
I made a short detour to Sennen on the way back to Penzance but only found the churchyard, the dead centre as Angela would say, worth photographing.


A saltire in the sky

What an athlete!

As a shakedown trip, this was a success. I got to try out the bike and half the luggage and made a gentle start to my E2E. Tomorrow is another day.

Mousehole Harbour

Day 0 Dundee to Penzance

Saturday, May 21, 2011.
I have just travelled almost the length of Britain. It took 12 hours and I saw a steady transition of landscapes and experienced a less steady transition in the accents of the train announcers (oo arrr). Why then (stop to look out the window at a lovely wide river which has just appeared) do I feel the need to cycle all the back up again then go past my house, literally, and keep going to John O Groats?
(Oh, here we are at “Plymouth the next stop”.)
Just because I can. I have motive and opportunity and I have wanted to do the end to end as long as I knew there was one.
If I cycle 50 miles a day, which is not too onerous in cycle-touring circles, it will take me three weeks. All I have to do every day for the next three weeks is dander along on my bike and write up my blog. Theoretically. I am not the fittest person in the world (no, honestly) but hopefully by the end you will share my enthusiasm for this….

Day 2 - Penzance to Newquay



Our bikes enjoy the view at Portreath

 Who would have guessed yesterday that by now I would have hooked up with a complete stranger and chucked away my intended route purely on her say so? I’m still going to John O Groats, just not the way my orange highlighter pen thinks I am.
Last night at 10pm I asked a lady in Penzance YHA if I could look at her map (mine’s is just cut up bits of atlas). Turns out she has been cycling round Cornwall for 20 years and knows all the cycle paths and tram roads that make the roller coaster roads a little bit easier. She even said where all the best tea stops, toilets and pasties were so today I followed Carol Parker like a little doggy, brain firmly in neutral.
While Scotland was getting blasted by 100mph gusts we were sailing past St Michael’s Mount with a following wind onto Marazion (toilets), Hayle (pasties), Portreath (tea and surfers), Perranporth (loadsatraffic) and, finally, Newquay (B&B).
You’ll notice the blog is a bit light on detail. That’s what happens when you cycle with a companion. you just gabble and rant for 40 miles and suddenly you are there. We did notice the rain though. It washed all the roads off Carol’s maps (Hah - my atlas pages stayed roadified) and it even washed away quite a lot of the paper, leaving merely holes.
We also noticed the hills. On the downhills your knuckle bones popped out through your skin because you were braking so fiercely and on the ups you could hardly push your bike, such was the absurd verticalness of the gradient. When tractors passed there was barely six inches between us, pressed into the verge, and the big back wheels.
I think I am sticking with Carol for one more day until our paths diverge as she heads of to meet a chum at Bideford and Audrey No Mates just keeps going North.