6th august
So many trips have started with the ride through three counties over to Harwich, just over 60 miles from home. This morning forecast was for rain so I was prepared for a rather muted start to the trip. As it turned out today was glorious and the ride joined the catalogue of sunny evening trips arriving with the sun low over the sea but still bright and warm. Thank goodness for Morrisons Harwich where I go and fill a carrier bag with a cabin dinner and bottle of wine. This trip it’s Morrisons sliced pork pie with egg, Morrisons pea shoots, port salut cheese yoghurt and Morrisons strawberry shortcakes which if they don’t disintegrate will make a fine breakfast for a couple of days. Accompanied by Morrisons Beaujolais villages.
In the queue waiting to board is the usual dozen or so bikes of all shapes and sizes with riders to match and enjoyable conversations with a few Germans all on BMWs of course. The most notable being a highly camp police Harley Davidson complete with flashing lights and siren. I thought the HDs looked a real handful to ride slowly stop and go up the circular ramp to the back of the boat.
This trip I am trying out my just bought Redverz Adventure tent, so big and tall you can actually keep your adventure bike inside it. I bought it more thinking about being able to stand up inside it than sharing it with Bertha though I might try that if I get melancholy. What better than non human company at night? Accompanying me is the following literature: where angels fear to tread by E M Foster, The elephant vanishes, Murakami, a collection of essays and interviews by Paul Auster plus a slim text book about narrative analysis.
It is 10.15, late already. I think the unwary stay up drinking on this trip. The savvy realise that the clocks are one hour ahead when we are rudely woken at a round 6.30 so get their head down even before the boat leaves dock at 23.15. So many times I have caught this ferry. I remember the first time clearly when I had only recently learned to ride and was the proud owner of a blue Triumph with only a tank bag and something small strapped on the back for luggage. Now I carry around probably about five times as much stuff.
I went up on deck for a cigarette and bumped into German biker Frank with amazing English but I was in the shower heading for bed as I felt the ship move off.
Tomorrow is a 400k ride to just south of Koblenz (stress on the first syllable I learned this evening ) to a campsite on the bank of the Rhein. So nearly all on motorways, but after that much nicer roads. Tomorrow evening I plan to scatter my mum’s ashes in the Rhein.

7th August
After a very tiring ride on motorways I arrived at Loreleyblick camping at about 2pm. I lost my trip data from the gPS but it was about 260 miles, not that much but tiring roads to ride after being woken up at what felt like the middle of the night but was 6.30. I think I am at the prettier end of this long campsite by the very fast flowing Rhein. It is dominated by motor homes and caravans apart from a few intrepid cyclists with tents. The Redverz it’s good so far. I spent ages putting it up. There is such a huge amount of space to be untidy in.
I walked up the road and found a gate leading down to a footpath down to the river and it was there that I scattered mums ashes from my hand into the river just as a barge piled high with coal sailed by, appropriate as her father was a miner. I then lay down in the tent and fell asleep as I always do. Motorcycling leads to sleep. I’ve been too tired to open a book so far.
Reviews say this campsite is noisy at night with trains running all night on both sides of the river. In fact we’ve just had stereophonic goods trains and it is loud. It’s somehow reassuring that all this stuff is getting moved around.
Later I did read the first few chapters of Where Angels Fear to Tread. One of EM Forsters early readers said she felt she needed to take a shower after reading it and I agree. It’s nasty not a very positive view of humans so far at least. I am sure a film has been made of it.
I slept very well apart from beings awoken by the predicted thunder of freight trains. At one point in the night I started counting the intervals between them and they were very short. I finally awoke just before seven.

A rare Saturday spent in London found me and H taking the riverboat from Bankside to Greenwich (£10 or so with an Oyster card – they hurry people on and off and move at high speed making the point they are definitely not a tour boat) and taking a short hot walk down the Thames path towards the east in the direction of but not going anywhere near the Thames barrier. A few of the photographs are below.

A gem we found was the Trafalgar Tavern in Greenwich, cool and uncrowded inside, but it turns out with variable reviews.

My mum is in Hospital at the moment. Here she is a few days ago.

Tuesday 10th September
I made it! I am on the ferry, now just less than one hour into our voyage and we’re definitely swaying.
Last night was the usual sleeping and dreaming and waking but the alarm on my watch, followed shortly by my phone went off when it was still dark and felt like the middle of the night, just after 7 and with the aid of my trusty head torch I was packed up and ready to ride out as I heard the campsite gate being opened just before 8. But it was dark and raining on the road and really difficult to see, out of town and up onto the motorway for a 35 minute journey to the port just this side of Bilbao.
Laredo to Bilbao in the rain at EveryTrail

It was difficult to find the way to the boat, as the whole portside area was under an inch of water so all the road markings were invisible and I rode around in and out of cones and lanes to finally get to the route to get into the Brittany Ferries queues. Phew. Please take queue number 43, said the woman in the booth. By this time I was soaked. I joined a queue of riderless bikes and wondered what shelter everyone had found. A lorry driver called to me that all the other bike riders were sheltering in the café and I walked over and squeezed into a small bus shelter like space already full and a half dozen or so bikers came before we got the call ‘now the motos’. Someone there was sharing his experience of travelling the middle East: ‘I went to Dubai airport once. I thought I was at a shepherd’s convention’. Much laughter. Interesting. When you are new to a group or on the edges its always the vocal members that you notice and assume they stand for the whole.
Driving on involved a steep decline down to the very bottom deck, which with the wet weather, caused widespread fear as I could tell from the rider in front of me and the comments of others. I stayed to watch Bertha get tied down then managed to get into my cabin just after it had been cleaned, saving waiting around in wet clothes.
After showering (with the ship’s many times laundered and barely there towels) I made straight to the restaurant and watched from the window as the last trucks drove on down below and we moved away, diagonally it seemed, from the quay. A lone remaining worker in bright orange stayed in the rain to see the boat leave, then got into his van and drove off. All the immigration police had already left a good half an hour before.

I ordered full breakfast in French (its ‘full breakfast’ but to be said in a slightly artificial way). I normally avoid all that but after a fortnight of crouching over a stove eating various varieties of pasta (they were all delicious – I am not complaining) I was not going to skimp on comforts for this 24 hours.
So now in my rather swaying cabin (I have a porthole this time), with the heating turned up and my clothes hanging on anything available to dry, I am going to start looking at some documents for the university’s Research Excellence Framework. I’m hoping the 130 mile ride back up to Cambridge tomorrow morning is dry.

Pictures so far are here.

Weds 4th September part 2
I have decided to move on tomorrow. The weather forecast says thunderstorms for the next few days though it was, and still is at after half past eight in the evening deliciously warm and sunny. But I feel I have to take the forecast serioiusly. I swam in the sea today. The beach was so delicious, warm sun yet constant cooling by the breeze and no flies. But to turn back toward the ports feel like the beginning of the end of the trip though there are still 6 night before I sail home.
Having given up Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Being and Time, I’ve turned to ‘Venture to the Interior’ by Laurens Van Der Post. He starts off by writing about flying to Africa from Health Row Aerodrome (in 1949). The book deals with British colonialism, as the other Laurence did, though post second world war not in the lead up to WWI. Of course I have no part in this, but my mother came from Germany the year before his story starts and my sister was born only three years after. So all his discussion of the role of Britain in the world and British values of decency ‘a nation should try to be fair, good and true, not merely an industrial sausage machine’, would sill have been in the air when my parents started their family. But I’m not sure I feel nostalgic for his vision of British virtue: only on page 44 so far, and with limited knowledge of the issues affecting post-war Britiain, I have the feeling that interest has always shaped British action, though it used to be dressed up with rhetoric of value and decency. I think people actually believed it themselves.
As I started cooking I heard the residents of the convent singing hymns, their harmonies wafting over the garden wall.