I couldn’t resist it – I’ve taken the day off to try out this bike….
On my first day of owning this bike I put my continent-crunching world-beating GSA through its paces – Destination Tescos in Ely. No problems getting out of cambridge. The border formalities were easy. Once on the A14 going west I felt a few drops of rain on my visor. Its well known that one shower on the A14 and the road will be impassable until next Spring. Luckily the rains held off. Some of the tarmac was ‘ever so slightly rough’ but the suspension coped really well. By lunchtime I arrived in Ely, a strange and wild place where banditry and corruption are well-known. Keeping a low profile I parked up the bike in Tesco and went inside to see if there was any food and drink available. With lots of gesticulations and shouting I made myself understood by the workers in Costa Coffee next to the pharmacy and cutomer toilets. On my return into Cambridge I was stopped at a chekpoint where I failed some of the questions on the IQ test. But with a bribe I was allowed in.
On the road I noticed some strange things: other bike riders don’t seem to return my nods any more. Instead I get greetings from the drivers of the following classes of vehicles: agricultural machinery, those big mowers that cut grass verges by the road; also scarecrows in the fields near Cottenham.
So day 1 was good – apart from struggling to get this machine into neutral once its warm. The riding position is good and the windscreen is great – I can ride with visor up now. I don’t know about its acceleration so no overtaking at the moment. It doesn’t feel as nippy as my previous bikes but presumably the power is there doing something.
Most of this post is also copied to the UKGSer website.
bizarre gardening accidents
An alien has visited my kitchen
While I was away in London an alien has visited my kitchen and has been trying to communicate with me:
Arriving in Lithuania
I was looking out for things turning Baltic in Copenhagen airport. Moving down, after waiting for 4 hours, into the slender waiting area for our tiny and dirty plane I heard new languages and looked into the faces of the men and the dress style of the women, looking for s0mething posst-communist – or something discernably different from Danish or English. After flying for an hour I opened my eyes to find ourselves just a few feet above the runway with slushy discoloured snow piled up and mist in the air. My map of the airport downloaded from some tourist site had made the place look huge. In fact the carousel carrying in our bags just ran for a minute, then stopped; all the bags had been off loaded. Outside I sensed something ex military in the air, in the barack looking buildings in the snow under the pine trees opposite. Its chilly but not cold. We stand around a bus stop from which my guide book assures us buses leave every 20 minutes for Klaipeda. Eventually taxi drivers tell us there are no buses. Whether this is a ruse or not to get our fares, none of us hesitate to load our bags and climb in. Sitting in tthe front in silence with the driver with his leather cap on, with the others talking in the back, i am glad for the opportunity to examine the roads, how people drive, what the cars are like, what the roadside building is like. Half built, sometimes roughly built with unfinished breeze block. Its raining and dull.
Klaipeda is the same, half built, gritty as the guide book says, huge puddles in the roads, but with distinct pockets of something new; bijou hotels like this (with its free wifi) and on the short walk I take in the darkening evening, galerijas where only women seem to be inside, hairdressers and boutiques. It reminds be for a moment of Croatia, where there is a real concern with style and it is done very nicely even though Paris is hundreds of miles away.
Where I’ve been: where I haven’t yet
Via checking out some Flickr records of bike tours of Eastern Europe, I discovered this site that draws maps of where you’ve travelled. This is my Europe map. it doesn’t go East at all.
Almeria
El Saltador in Almeria in southern Spain is a beautifully restored farmhouse. H and I spent a week there at the end of July. It is in the middle of the deserts that the spaghetti westerns were filmed in.
Our flight from Stansted was delayed by 4 hours so we arrived after dark which is exactly what we didn’t want to do as we knew that the drive up to the farmhouse was along twisty roads high in the mountains. Unexpectedly the GPS that I bought with us took us straight to the location. There was a huge sense of relief when the headlights picked out the name of the village we were heading for when I thought that we were probably miles away. The hostess had some food luckily left over and we had bought a bottle of wine on the way, so after midnight we sat outside on the veranda with delicious beef and beautiful red wine.
We found a routine for the week, breakfast
followed by 2 or 3 hours of work (H) and meditation for me (I had just bought Mindfulness in Plain English). I had a whole hall to myself.
The coast was nearly an hour’s drive away.
