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.