Courtesy of RAC route planner, it should be here:
Here’s the route. Interestingly the RAC says it should take 4 hours and 39 minutes. I put the same start and end point into my Garmin Zumo and it estimates 3 hours and 39 minutes with the same route. Maybe the motorcycle-orientated GPS expects you to go faster.
There’s something about going away and working somewhere else for a while that makes you feel valued in a way you often don’t feel when at the office. The unit Health, Man and Society is a collection of anthropologists, psychologists, a theologian and others with a nice band of PhD students investigating aspects of health. They seem very liberal and open minded about disciplinary orientation which is a refreshing change considering the way that some members of disciplines view the outsiders. Here’s their website.
And here they are having a tea break where they talk with each other. That’s amazing in itself.
Tomorrow after dropping in briefly, I pack everything up into my panniers and drive back the 120k to Esbjerg to catch the ferry back to Harwich and home.
Faaborg is a pretty little town with a marina about 30k south of here on the coast and is lovely to cruise around in this beautiful Northern European sun that lights up the terracotta tiles on every roof here. An old south African man made conversation over my bike, saying that it looked Japanese. Some people want to know everything, so after I had told him, yes I had been a nurse, he told me how he had been operated on by Christian Bernard – well, it was actually his brother and he used to know his daughter too, his kidney was smashed and two men arrived in the hospital in dress suits having been called away from dinner, one of them being Christian Bernard’s brother – presumably. The town has a small cobbled market that sells plants and flowers and features a supposedly controversial statue of a giant drinking from a cow’s udder.
From there I rode along the coast toward Svendborg looking for the bridge over to a small long thin island called Langeland (I wonder why). Of course I got lost and ended up on a small island called – I cant find it in the guidebook. But thanks to my trusty GPs, I made my way across huge bridges to my goal.
Very rural but with a surprising amount of traffic. Ah, but getting back: what a gusty side wind, scary. Phew. No wonder I am having two glasses of wine before 5pm. Pics on my Flickr.
Phew. The sun is shining but I feel exhausted. When will I learn to work effectively with my GPS?
Where did I go on my route to find the easy-to-find E20? And I found myself pointing at the check in at Esbjerg all set to return 5 minutes after I arrived. But I am here at last and no one is impressed when I say it took 2 hours to get here (120k). 86miles; average speed 58mph The motorway ride here and the road into town was not that enjoyable. I’m not sure why. Perhaps the lack of sleep (I must have slept lightly from about 3.30 till 8am.
My host here at Angarhus is funny. He’s highly energetic and bodily enthusiastic, often adopting a particular pose to make a linguistic point. He says he is Basil to his wife’s (who just walked by) Sibyl. The room is unattractive and next to a slightly noisy junction but I have a lovely sunny balcony with a table equipped with terracotta ashtray. And there’s free wifi. And the sun is constantly shining.
I’ve just booked what looks like a lovely appartment in Lisbon for a week there in July. I recommend http://ferienwohnung-lissabon.de/ Prices seem reasonable and the site has lots of information and photographs, maps etc. The next step s to book a one-way train journey down there via Eurostar and tgv from Paris to the border with Spain where you connect with an overnight sleeper that arrives in Lisbon at 11am (it must go slowly I think). for that seat61.com looks like it provides lots of detailed information and advice though the prices (£59 return on Eurostar London to Paris seems outdated. It looked more like £89 when I visited Eurostar.
Finally I think I have found a useful site for trip planning at motowhere which is aimed at bikers (just with the descriptors you can add to your routes – like’low-enforcement’). Draw a line from Hook of Holland to Marienbad in the Czech Republic and it automatically snaps to a route and gives you an idea of the mileage. Here’s my proposed route for the first days of my proposed trip across eastern Europe. I wonder how sensible it is. You are meant to be able to load the routes into a GPS. I wonder if that will work.
