9th August sailing home
I’m sailing home. It’s 10.30 UK time and we have just left Caen headed for Portsmouth. Today everything went according to plan. With the help of my two beefy helpers we hauled Belinda out of her garage, packed up and I headed off from Ile de Re at around 10.30. Getting up to Caen, all 300 miles (really 280 according to the bike’s clock), was easy. There was mostly little traffic, petrol stations where I needed them and pleasant enough places to stop, rest and get something to eat and drink. By 6.30 I rode into the centre of Caen and looked round it’s cathedral and sat in the pleasant shade of the castle watching the people come and go, before returning to Belinda and driving the twenty minutes or so out to the port. Her cruise control was useful on the 130kph speed limit motorways with little traffic. It was a beautiful evening as I arrived up in Normandy. I arrived around 7.30 pm in time to eat some passing fish and chips at the terminal to save searching for something to eat late once on the boat.

In the queue for the boarding I had the usual interesting conversations, first briefly with a young guy in an Audi who told me, sitting on the bonnet smoking a cigarette, that he was a jockey and had come to France twice in the last week to ride a horse, coming 4th and 5th in his races. I said that seemed not a bad result and he said at least he didn’t fall off, three people had fallen in the last race he rode. He was rather flouncy and I imagine the combination of youth and a highly rewarded job are likely to lead to this (I was thinking of footballers). Then, more interesting, after I had joined the five other people on bikes, I talked to a man who shared with me all the same anxieties about manoeuvring big bikes in tricky situations, like gravel and sloppy ground as well as similar experiences with the IAM. Then we were told to ride on. They pack our bikes closely together, practically touching which feels uncomfortable. Once showered I bought an uncharacteristic pint of Stella (it seems the only drink that would be right) along with a couple of cigarettes out on the deck watching, with a dozen other passengers, the ship moving away from the now dark harbour. I observed that English men have problems with shorts, many ill chosen and not matching a slightly formal top half. I am pleased with my trousers from Ljubljana. So, all is good, and all went well: campsites were all good, weather was perfect and there were no disasters with the bike, which performed effortlessly well. But as one or two of us said in the queue, roads in France are a bit boring from the bike point of view. A couple of guys had ridden up from Alicante and we all talked about how enjoyable the roads in Spain are.

Do I have any thoughts for a next trip? I remember after last year I felt I had got a few things wrong, but this is different because everything did go so well. I think the main ingredient was taking the time to find and book small, carefully chosen campsites. Their friendliness made an enormous difference, and for the most part I think they attract a more interesting bunch of visitors.

So tomorrow is the familiar and rather heart sink journey clockwise round the M25 from the A3 round to the A1, then dropping in somewhere on the way home to pick up some champaign to celebrate H and I’s 31st wedding anniversary. So far, nearly an hour into the channel, the crossing looks like it will be smooth, with hopefully a good night sleep.

Later
For the first time my circulation on the M25 was uneventful and I arrived home, after 140 miles riding today. Here is the trace of the journey homeward.

Friday 7th August
I’m now in Ile de Re. I seem to have accumulated a number of insect bites at various places on my left leg. I’ve now retrieved my 100 percent Deet to keep by me at all times (which I didn’t need last night despite the evidence of a mosquito net over the window of the bedroom I have here).
The last twenty four hours have been uneventful. I moved pitch back there on the campsite, went for a 7k walk, through beautiful woodland paths, enjoyable until my footwear, unsuitable for walking, started to give me blisters for the last kilometre. Two ageing men invited me for drinks on the campsite last night and in the spirit of the place’s friendliness I went to join them. They served me white wine but disappointingly it had obviously not come from their caravan refrigerator (they had a satellite dish too, a large one). They talked to me about the round the world cruise that they took in 2008. I must say virtually everything they told me about it strengthened my opinion that I would never go on one including a fight breaking out in the launderette resulting in the two involved families being ejected from the ship at the next port of call and having to fly home at their own expense (apparently this potential penalty was made clear to passengers at the time of booking). I stayed for an hour and went to bed in not the best of moods. During the night I was awoken by scratching sound apparently just under where my head was lying. I remember having this experience in a campsite in Germany. I was convinced that it was a small burrowing animal emerging under my tent.

I woke finally at seven and decided to get up and get packed, though with waiting for the dew to dry off the tent and bequeathing a few items off food and drink, I finally rolled out at 9.30. The twisty roads leading to the main road were enjoyable but once on the main route I concluded that French roads don’t have much to recommend them. But, after filling up with petrol (the GPS led me very efficiently to two petrol stations that obviously had not served petrol for years) I finally made it after nearly four hours riding to the beautiful Ile de Re that you reach over an impressive long bridge over the sea. It costs three Euros to cross. Suddenly there are people everywhere, mostly on bicycles, all clearly on holiday and nearly all young. I realise what a different slice of people I have been spending my time with over the last week and a half. I arrived at Helen’s family’s house in a beautiful web of small streets with white painted cottages and bright coloured flours. I made heavy weather of getting Belinda into their garage but I am promised significant brawn to help me pull her out backwards on Sunday when I leave to take the five plus hour ride up to Caen. I took a stroll through these lanes down to the beach here. It is a stunning Atlantic beach crammed with brown bodies but with, strangely and rather ominously a military looking plan circling very low above. Where they looking for terrorists about to launch a beach attack? Whatever, I decided to retrace my steps back to the house.

Later
I have written before about the ingredients for wonderful camping. I remember on my last night under canvas in the Black Forrest last year when at least one of the ingredients was lacking, writing that. The two key ingredients are good weather and a beautiful and socially agreeable site. This trip has combined them both, pretty much unfailingly. Tonight, for example, I was able to buy a bottle of chilled white wine to sip while I cooked up a simple but tasty pasta dish on my stove next to this lovely still river in the still hot evening (onions, tomatoes and some sausage fried up with some curly pasta) interrupted in a good natured way by Betty, black little dog owned by two men camping up just up the hill, who came to investigate me and my tent and my rubbish bag followed by Betty’s sweet owner. There are two women now just behind me also with a dog, a white dog while Betty is a black dog, and a mixed gender couple just over there also by the river. Up on the hard sites are more conventional camper van travellers but nice all the same. There is complete friendliness on this site. But back down here, with my easily cooked meal on a borrowed table done and washed up it is still warm and humid and I sit hot and shirtless and read as the light here starts to dim. It’s half past eight. This campsite is full of the English, or at least English speakers. It makes casual conversations while waiting to dry up or humour about tonight’s expected rain so easy and evokes a sense, imaginary of course, of connection, for me aloneness but with the always available and present connection with others.

There is a very faint rumble of thunder in the distance. I have spent so many hours in my tent in heavy rain that I have a routine: bring everything in, gather it all right in the middle, balance what might get soggy on top of my boots, tighten up the guy ropes so that the fly sheet and inner tent don’t touch, then pray.