biking

A perfect day, assuming anything could be

30th July
First day not subject to the tyranny of motorways. Forty nine miles to lunch at Chalonnes a Loire. Nice small d roads.

Today has gone really well. All in all I enjoyed the last campsite. I opted in for pizza mainly to join the crowd along the long table. I supposed I had to be the oldest guest, the others were all couples with young children, intelligent, funny, nice company and I was so glad not to be camping with small children any more, one couple with two small girls, twins maybe who screamed and shouted at every opportunity. There is no privacy camping. Imagine washing two naked screaming toddlers with a strange man brushing his teeth a couple of feet away.

I think the success of these trips, finally, is in the detail. Yesterday evening before it got too late I plotted a route along small roads close to the Loire from where I stayed to where I am now, camping l’etournerie. But where that is I am not sure exactly. This site is sunny! And tucked away down a grass track with maybe six pitches on it and a small swimming pool. I think this is one of the adults only sites that I booked (actually planning this trip is rather hazy as it got mixed up with my medical tests when I was convinced I’d spend the summer in hospital having parts removed). It makes a difference – the planning not the surgery. The place really is quiet, just the conversation and splashing of three Dutch people in the pool just down there, the buzzing of bees and the crunching of eucalyptus leaves under my feet. The place is simple. So different from the theme park places I have stayed at or nearly stayed at. This is a nice recipe.

So today my mostly GPS-less route planning worked perfectly. I had a list of road numbers and turnings written on a sheet of paper in the tank bag and managed to get most of the way here like that. I stopped at Chalonnes a Loire at a large supermarket, the brand of which is new to me and had a salmon and prawn salad and bought some provisions (when there is an opportunity to get food I have realised you should always take it). I spent a good hour there. Eventually my trail ran dry and I opted to turn on the GPS and obey its suggestion for a blast down the motorway then back down some very smaller roads where I always wonder if the GPS really knows what it is doing. Eventually down a grassy track I found the place. Belinda did not like the uneven grassy ground, or rather I didn’t and sadly we can’t keep vehicles on site so she is just behind me out of site on the track. Now, I shall be complaining to Touratech because the handle on my brand new Zega Pro 2 pannier broke while I was carrying it. It was hugely heavy I admit, but I expected a bit more from this hard core brand.

I was too late (4.30 is too late) to order dinner. The site owners make three course meals and serve them at the campers’ tents. So I have ordered for tomorrow evening. I have also ordered pain au chocolate and croissants for breakfast. This morning breakfast was two beautiful moist pain au raisin but my attempt at tea was not good. Dried milk definitely does go off. I will return to coffee so at the U-shop supermarket I searched for a device to make coffee and only managed to get a tea strainer and some ground coffee so I will improvise. It will be better than tea with globules. Today’s ride I think was 144 miles. My average throttle position since I’ve had the bike is 11 percent and I’ve made 5 and a half thousand gear changes.

On French soil, well, Tarmac

29th July
Ah getting up at 6.15 after not sleeping that well, after dreaming that my cabin was full of people or that I was trying to sleep in forbidden parts of the boat… Mercifully the cafe that sells coffee is within sight of my cabin door, so I sat and watched the bright but cloudy sky go by over the settled sea with a paper cup of passable coffee and the custard tart that H gave me just as I was leaving. That was breakfast number one, another to be had somewhere in a couple of hours on the road. The forecast is for cloudiness with some sun but no rain drops so that is looking good. Thirty minutes till we land, time to squeeze everything back into my bag. I am so pleased not to be travelling with small children as almost everyone is here, the constant focus on discipline and behaviour.

On the massively packed car deck I bumped into Helen and her partner by coincidence on the same crossing and parked close to each other. I will be staying with them in La Rochelle next week, on the two last nights of the trip.

Later… I am at Le Chant de L’oiseaux, a beautiful small site with about ten pitches, run by a British couple who you can tell are really particular about how the place looks and runs. Instead of a supermarket and my stove I am trying out their home made pizza cooked in three shifts, the first for children (he apologised that there were so many children on site at the moment though they all must be out apart from one little boy who his dad proudly sat him on my motorbike seat without his nappy) the second for women and the third at about 8.30 for men (now 9pm I wish I had cooked my own). Nice but a little strange. No free sockets in the bathroom to charge up your gadgets. In fact there are notices everywhere about what you can’t do and must do. Above the recycling bin for glass is the instruction Do not drop glass into the bin. I have a beautiful partly shaded spot in the corner next to a couple ‘without children’. I have ordered pizza. I was shocked to find that this campsite was only 125 miles away from the port. Or was it? Perhaps that is as the crow flies. I haven’t yet worked out how to get all the geeky figures from this GPS.

How did today go? The weather has been perfect: sunny all day from 9am when we left St Malo, cool though, about 18 degrees. The roads were ok to boring and my attempt to avoid the peage failed dismally. Then there was my nervous foreign technophobia first with a pay at pump petrol station (in the middle of the night I realised that I had put in the wrong pin for my card and mercifully didn’t do it three times as my card would have been blocked) and then the dreaded peage which appeared to refuse to issue a ticket. I stopped thankfully at a motorway service and picnic area and got my first glimpse of the French and a meal deal which I had no hesitation in agreeing to, while on the TV screen in the petrol station and also on the ferry and here on site the ‘deepening crisis’ at Calais where refugees appear to be trying to force their way into Britain. David Cameron is outraged. The Brits are having their holidays upset. I sat out in the warming sun then headed off. Once off the main roads I found the local road down to this site, through forests, quite beautiful and an easy pace, shady. I could do with more of that.

It was good to get the old tent out after my flirtation last year with a huge Redverz tent, marketed as being able to accommodate two adults plus their adventure bike. I knew it was a daft idea and should never have succumbed. I was trying to remember when my tent was last used. Someone did not sweep it out after they used it.
The bike seems to have much more room in the luggage and I have been trying to decide what it is I have left at home. The panniers work well, more tricky to open than the old ones but stunningly well made and capacious. The GPS is good apart from finding the most ugly roads to send me down. Cleverly it knows when you are running out of petrol and offers to direct you to the nearest petrol station. I’ve used that twice on this trip, in fact every time I have filled up, already. So far, so good, looking for nice places to stay and good weather are two good ingredients.
Today I rode 166 miles. I’m reading The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane. I’m only up to page 36 but so far I have to agree with the reviewers who find it a pretentious list of name dropping and pseudo poetic erudition. You get three or four lines about Wordsworth, then the same about Nietzsche, and so on. The same reviewers say that the last sections are much better. I may skip to them. I had thought a book about travel would make a good companion for my own trip but not so far.

life on the ocean waves: on the way to France

28th July 2015
Written on the rolling waves.

Amid calls from a son for moral advice and plumbers arriving to investigate our failing boiler, I climbed into my armoured clothing and set off on the bike for this trip to France. Moving was so slow in Cambridge, first down Mill Road then along to Trumpington Street then finally onto the A10 where it started to lightly rain, then down to the M25 anti-clockwise interrupted by a call to fill up with petrol somewhere near ghastly Uxbridge, my willingness to risk reduced by my last experience of calling out the RAC on the side of the same orbital road because Bertha was always optimistic about petrol, then tailbacks finally leaving the orbit and heading off toward Portsmouth only to get stuck into another jam. I arrived in Portsmouth with only a stop to get fuel and a to much two bars of a triple Bounty bar standing next to the pump. Over three hours riding and tiring. Arriving here though, as usual, on a bike you get your own lane right to the front of hundreds of cars in line. One other man on a bike who was very nervous about parking up. The men here just tied our two bikes to the railing with some old rope, we both picked up something more substantial and did our own fixing, lingering anxiously, mind you I am glad now, two hours into the all night trip and there is some pitching and yawing I’m unaccustomed to in my trips to date. We sat and chatted while our cabins were cleaned. He learned to ride even more recently than I did, got the licence that limits riders to small bikes but ignored that and just bought a big bike anyway!

I’ve just returned to my swaying cabin from the restaurant (I didn’t fancy the cafe with its hoards of children) where I remembered that the French enjoy food unlike the Germans and I wondered if this could be the key to a successful holiday, weather permitting as always. Feeling rather over full not helped by the swaying opening and closing the door to my bathroom like a ghostly hand is moving it, bringing back pseudo memories of my childhood trips on the Harwich to Holland ferry where I was always sick. Always? Perhaps just once.

So tomorrow I head in a direction I approximately know. I have forgotten to write down which campsites I go to on each night. I have GPS coordinates of each but I don’t know which order I have booked them. Pitching and yawing.

Dordogne by BMW 1200gs

Tomorrow I leave for my ninth motorcycle trip. I’m heading down to South(ish) west France, to the Dordogne, camping for the most part (apart from two nights at a friend’s house in La rochelle). Since my last trip to the Black Forrest, I have a new bike, new luggage, a new GPS (I bought it with the bike), new bluetooth headset and even new prescription sun glasses non polarising – so I can read the GPS screen. What could possibly go wrong? Well, the weather for one thing. I ought to publish the dates I go camping so that everyone else can make a point of staying at home. Its blustery and raining on and off today and some sailings from Portsmouth have been cancelled today due to bad weather.
This clever little map makes it all look so calm:

Still, supplies have been renewed, the bags are packed,

oil and fuel strapped on the back of one pannier, a litre of vodka on the other, trying to travel a bit lighter this time, so the huge Redverz tent is staying at home in the cupboard and my faithful Vango tent is coming along. A great hair cut (instead of last minute dental work) too.

Riding to Snettisham

At last it is warm and sunny and its the Saturday of Strawberry Fayre. (I first went in 1976 I think). I read that the police want this to be a family friendly event this year,unspoiled by the usual crime, drunkenness and drug-taking. So they have put up a big fence around the site and people are searched for anything in excess of 4 cans of beer as they try to go in.

I decided to escape on Belinda and headed off to the Norfolk coast. I had a hope to drop in and visit Kate or David at their totally rebuilt shed on Snettisham beach. Despite knowing they would not be in residence I could not resist the nice ride up the A10 from here. There was a little too much traffic but the road is not bad and the weather good apart from some fiendish gusts of wind. Its 55 miles but it feels further.

The new shack looks like this. I think it needs a GS parked outside.

Meeting Ted Simon – big fish in a small pond

Sunday 31st May was an opening at The Adventure Bike Shop down in Suffolk, in Acton, not to be confused with the ghastly Acton in west London where I once worked as a Health visitor. What drew me down there was the hope of meeting and talking to the father of motorcycle travel writing Ted Simon who was billed to be giving a talk. (Read the first paragraph of that biography in the link and you will see that he is an old fashioned person. I don’t think young people go to Paris and ‘fall into journalism’ as he did. Or maybe they do – hopefully). After killing time fingering some Touratech products and trying on a Nexx XD1 helmet (more about that some other time) I wandered into the small marquee where Ted was speaking. He had a computer perched on his lap, was holding a microphone in one hand and every now and then tried to open a bottle of Coke with the other without putting down the mic, giving up and forgetting about it for a while. Because, of course, I respect him so much I was riveted by his account of his memories of both of his travels. His lap top was misbehaving and I wondered why doesn’t one of the organisers sort it out? Ted must have recounted these events and his responses to them many many times by now and there was perhaps a slight sense of weariness – not about having to do the show one more time but, I think, that the world had changed so much since his first trip in the 1970s. I think he is still astonished that his books have brought him such fame. He commented, ‘you don’t have to be clever to be safe on a journey like this, you just have to have the right attitude, one of humility. In fact you can be stupid but if you have some humility rather than the arrogance that can come with stupidity, you are likely to be safe’.

After he had finished I made a quick move to the front and offered him my copy of what must have been a short run, “Riding Home” published by Penguin, (not Riding High as I presume it was later retitled) to sign.

Ted commented that that edition was not well made but I said it was not badly written. I said that I was sure he was tired of people complementing his writing but added mine. He replied that he had no problem with complements but never knew how to reply to them. I ventured to tell him that I thought his motorcycle writing was unusual in that he actually had interesting and intelligent things to say and he replied, “well, I’m a big fish in a small pond”. That was not the frank answer I expected but I can see that he is aware of the truth of it. I was pleased to have met him. He is over eighty I think, and its unlikely we will meet again – he lives in America. In fact I had tears in my eyes as I turned and walked away, and got on my bike.

The Adventure Bike Shop is only 35 miles and a lovely ride away from Cambridge, just past the beautiful Long Melford. Afterwards I rode through some more beautiful countryside to Ipswich to visit Andrew. I was starving as I had had no lunch and ate nearly all the delicious home made biscuits that someone had brought him. Andrew’s show at Arthouse1 is on my Flickr site here. Andrew was not well enough to attend.

The ride home was a simple blast down the A14 where the bike showed me that it is far happier breaking the speed limit than Bertha.

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