Note: On this trip I recorded my thoughts on a Dictaphone and these are transcriptions. They have a different feel to writing. Its an experiment.
16th of June. From my cabin on the Stenna ship to Hook of Holland. Well, it seems that the last couple of trips, we’ve had a kind of disaster in the first 100 miles of getting from home to the ferry even last year, it was a motorbike malfunctioned in a very strange way. This time, leaving London, the traffic was so, so heavy at every point, and there were some brief moments of respite when you can actually go to proper speed but, but very quickly, you’d end up just in queued traffic again, whether it was accidents, or just the volume of traffic. Maybe Friday evening, leaving London wasn’t the best timing. But that was more than that. So having got the three quarters of the way to here, I just stopped for petrol, which I needed. And when I got off the bike, I could see that the bag that I’d put all this food in: the delicious apricot tart that my partner lovingly made and freshly made loaf of sourdough bread and the beautiful cheese and the bottle of water in a really nice bag just dropped off the bike at some point. Got no idea when. And it was really all the effort that had gone into making that little, that little feast. Really, really sad.
I arrived via the crowded A12 much later than I normally would.
So arriving at Harwich there’s usually other people on bikes. And that always actually really nice people that you chat to. Bikers on mass I kind of have a kind of aversion to but when you actually meet individual people, you know, they’re just nice people interested in travel and all ages. So in the cabin, I’ve eaten my snack, my dinner which is from Morrison’s in Harwich. With a little bit of some Italian beer. And I’m seeing whether I’ve got the energy to get out of the cabin to find someplace with a signal for the phone just to send a text back to my partner. I’ve been frantically charging everything.
