I start off cycling north to Scotland, but halfway there I decide to head south-west to Oxford instead. That’s how things work out sometimes.
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Wednesday 5 June 2019. Norwich · Cromer |106 km|
[A really great day of cycling. The weather was ideal – around 17°C and overcast, but no rain and not much wind]
The much-touted Norfolk Broads were a bit ho-hum to my mind, but the quiet country lanes of the National Cycle Network’s route 30, paralleling the coast from Great Yarmouth to Cromer, were delightful.
First though, I loitered in Norwich until 11.30, enjoying a Cromer Crab in-the-shell, and then couldn’t resist a minted lamb pie with peas and mash washed down with a bottle of Fentiman’s cherry cola, all from stalls in the city’s excellent downtown Market Place. I also spent some time scouring book shops for a copy of Lonely Planet’s ‘Biking Britain’, but it’s out of print now and hasn’t been revised since 2009, so no luck there. The £2.50 map of the National Cycle Network that I did buy only covers the route from Great Yarmouth to King’s Lynn, and I generally let Ziggy’s GPS over-ride the mapped route anyway.
I headed west from Norwich on back-country lanes and met the North Sea at Caister-on-Sea. And Caister didn’t disappoint either – it’s the embodiment of all those memes about the English sea-side that so amuse us Australians: a stone-only ‘beach’, a run-down amusement park, plenty of ‘Chippys’ and vast trailer parks full of cheek-to-jowl identical demountables – but not so deplorable as to make it worthwhile taking any pictures, so you’ll just have to imagine it.
From Mundsley on to Cromer, only 12 km, it became progressively more posh – more green, more manicured and more… well, ‘golf-coursey’, I suppose.
Cromer is an up-market seaside town with a pier and a pebbly beach (and a couple of golf courses). I stayed overnight there, in the Edwardian-era Cliftonville Hotel, which has enough of its bygone grandeur still intact to make one feel you’re a bit-part in an Agatha Christie novel. This feeling is enhanced by the omni-present and superciliously-obsequious and condescending liveried staff and the well-heeled geriatric clientele who seem to lap it all up. Not bad for 40 quid, which included a meagre breakfast, where the testy waiters try to upsell you to the more substantial cooked fare on offer.
Thursday 6 June 2019. Cromer · Long Sutton |115 km|
It was a very pleasant ride all the way to King’s Lynn, first along the blue-signed National Cycle Network route 30, the Norfolk Coast Cycleway, that, at the village of Wighton, suddenly becomes the red-signed National Route 1, The North Sea Cycle Route. You don’t get to see the coast at all, but the travel is all on quiet country lanes.
King’s Lynn I found to be a rather unattractive town, so I moved on after a crappy pasty and no iced coffee. I used to admire English culture, but now not so much – they simply don’t ‘do’ iced coffee, for starters, and don’t get me going about there never being any tomato sauce in-store to go with a pasty: that’s just plain barbaric!
The route deteriorated after King’s Lynn. I was on narrow and heart-stopping busy B roads (at school pickup time and then the work knock-off peak hour rush) all the way to Long Sutton. I had to stop on the way for a 2-hour recharge at a horrible place called Clenchwarden – in the Victory Hotel there, that I wouldn’t recommend for stimulating conversation or ambience either.
Worn out, I stayed for the night at the Granary Hotel in the village of Long Sutton. The room for 40 quid was sub-standard (the smell of new paint didn’t quite cover up the smell of old mould) and the burger meal in their restaurant very average. The WIFI didn’t work in the room either, so I worked on this blog in the restaurant. AND furthermore I suspect this is where my subsequent battery problems stemmed from – a power surge or something maybe ruined one of them.
Friday 7 June 2019. Long Sutton · Lincoln |115 km|
OK, so one of my batteries has developed a fault. It indicates full charge but doesn’t deliver any power. This puts me in a quandary as it obviously needs attention but there do not appear to be any Bosch eBike specialists for several hundred miles heading north.
I therefore decide to abandon the Scottish project for now when I reach Boston (itself an interesting town – I wish I’d made it to there yesterday) and decide to head inland towards Lincoln instead. At this stage, I am still hedging my bets – should the dead battery miraculously come to life again I could continue on up north via the Lincoln Wolds.
There is a strong headwind too, and with just the one battery in working order I only manage 50 km before there is zilch power left and have to charge up again. This I do at the quaint and traditional, low-ceilinged King’s Head Hotel in Huntcastle, where they are quite tolerant of my wet and drippy presence for 3 hours – did I mention it rained all day – and where I get a really tasty beef pie with peas and mash – oh, and a haircut from the Barber’s next door.
The haircut turns out to be a bad idea though. Apart from now looking like Friar Tuck (but without the bald patch in the middle!), the rather hefty mature-age apprentice hairdresser was painfully slow and uncertain in the use of her equipment. About halfway through, she snipped one of her fingers – a minor injury, just a nick – but acted as though she’d cut her throat and looked as though she was about to faint. I was short on sympathy at that point. Her boss-lady took over, but only to ‘tidy-up’, she assured her protégé, (wanting to bolster her self-esteem and not discourage her from the profession for good, I suppose), so I’m left with a basin-cut until it grows out. Personally, I think they should both abandon the profession.
It started raining in earnest as I was leaving Huntcastle, and rained all the way to Lincoln too, but it turned out to be terrific riding, especially the last 15 miles from Bardney, along a path between the Sincil Dyke watercourse and the River Whitlam.
And so a wet and dreary me entered the town of Lincoln, where I had to labour up the incredibly steep and rain-slickened cobblestone streets to get to the cathedral in the centre, which is located on top of a prominent hill. Fact: Lincoln Cathedral was the tallest structure in the world for 238 years, (superceding the Great Pyramid), until it’s central spire collapsed in 1548.
The cathedral is under extensive renovation right now, and it and its immediate surrounds did not make for much of a photo op. I stayed in the White Hart, a grand old dame of a hotel right behind the cathedral, and enjoyed an excellent, though tardily-delivered, meal of superb black pudding entrée and main of venison and red wine pie at ‘Brown’s Restaurant and Pie Shop’ down the street a bit.
Saturday 8 June 2019. Lincoln · Peterborough |141 km|
I hung around for a while in Lincoln. Washed some clothes in the bathroom sink, got a pasty (without sauce, god-dammit) and a really nice bacon buttie (but no iced-coffee, goddamn it again), got the hotel to dry my wet clothes in their laundry because they’d turned off the room radiators, and then headed out of town at 11am just as the rain started to really come tumbling down and wet them all again – the heaviest rainfall of my trip so far.
I was on a terrific National Cycling Network path, route 64, at first – all the way to Newark-on-Trent, which is a really nice town too – and then it was a boring ride on to Grantham.
At Great Gonerby (yes, really), just before Grantham, and after only 52 km travelled, I had zero charge left and was obliged to loiter in the Recruiting Sergeant pub for 3 hours – from 2.15 until 5.15 – waiting for the batteries oops, battery singular, to fully charge, but at least I did have an interesting wide-ranging conversation with an Anglo-German couple in their 70s while watching the cricket, which made the time pass quickly (unlike at Clenchwarden two days ago).
“Besides being colours, what do orange, silver and purple have in common?” I didn’t know either, but it was the riddle of the week on the chalk board. And, btw, I do know now. Nyuck nyuck. Because I googled it. You can do the same, or you can ask me.
After Grantham I only made it as far as Stamford, another 52 km further on, before the battery was flat again. And it was a horrible wind-swept desolate ride too I can tell you, paralleling the frenetic A1 freeway on a slip road right next to it for most of the way, and strenuously eking out the battery life again by keeping to ECO mode uphill and into the wind. I searched desperately for a room in Stamford, but unfortunately for me Billy Ocean was giving a concert at Burghley House a couple of miles out of town and everywhere was fully booked.
What to do? It was 8 pm already, with no accommodation locally and no power to get me anywhere else. So I manned-up and had a fancy meal at an intimate cellar restaurant called Candlesticks (which also does rooms, but they too were fully booked – those lucky buggers, my coupling co-dining couples). The owner, Nelio Pinto, is an ex-Leicester City footballer and an affable chatty guy, so that helped the time pass.
Really worried by now about the prospect of not finding anywhere at all to stay, I used Booking.com to reserve a room at the Holiday Inn in Peterborough for £106. That was still 25 km away so I gave it until 10.30 pm at Candlesticks when, by my battery management calculations that I’m getting pretty good at, I figured I might just about have enough juice to get me there, and headed off (I did too, but, nerve-rackingly, only just). Nelio wanted to close up his restaurant by then anyway.
Big mistake heading out at 10.30pm though. I was on a quiet-enough road, the B1443, riding in pitch-blackness with only my feeble bike headlight to turn shadows into trees, when I saw a vast convoy of cars coming down a side-road to intercept the road I was on. It was the Billy Ocean concert crowd heading home from the venue in a hurry, and I was thrown into the mix. So I was alternately blinded by car headlights and then pitched into night-blindness all the way into Peterborough, as cars whizzed by dangerously overtaking me on the hilly and narrow single-lane winding road without a verge, about a metre away from me. To cap it all off, the bike GPS simply failed completely and my iPhone went flat too, so no google maps either. Good thing it was a Saturday night and all the pubs in the little villages were still open, so I could drop in and ask directions. After a few piloting errors, I made it safely to the Holiday Inn and a big Jack Daniel and Coke by 11.45 pm. Never again! I’m still shaking.
Sunday 8 June 2019. Peterborough · Cambridge |95 km|
I went to Rutland Cycle store in Peterborough that, coincidently, is quite near the Holiday Inn, as soon as it opened at 10 am to get the bike looked at. Kurt there was very helpful, but with his limited resources and limited personal experience we couldn’t fix it. It definitely seemed like one of the batteries was kaput, but when we replaced it with a new one off another bike the same error message came up and my bike still wouldn’t recognize the new battery. I needed a bigger store, and that meant getting to Cambridge where eBikes are much more common. So off I went.
I only got as far as Stilton, that of the cheese fame, when I figured I’d better charge up again, and spent 2 hours doing so at The Bell pub where the food was gourmet standard. The ride, though, was forlorn all the way to Huntington, paralleling the A1 on noisy slip roads mostly, but then picked up a bit after that as I was on a dedicated bike path alongside the Guided Busway. On the busway, double-decker buses roar along a cement track without the driver having to steer because raised cement kerbs the same width as the bus keep the bus on track. Hard to see the point of it, but it seems to work.
It rained again, of course, as it has every day I’ve been in England so far. The head wind for the last 20 km was really something fierce as well, stressing me out battery-management-wise, but I made it to Cambridge. Just. This one-battery deal is a real bummer.
For once, I had booked a room in advance. This was at A & B Guest House, but it turned out to be pretty crappy and unfriendly and not worth the £65. So much for trying to save money. The YHA was across the road, where I had a paltry meal of defrosted panko squid fingers and 3 packets of peanut M&Ms with 1½ litres of beer.
Monday 9 June 2019. Cambridge · Milton Keynes |95 km|
I hightailed it over to Rutland’s downtown Cambridge bike shop in the rain first thing in the morning, but eBikes are not their forte and so they sent me over to their Barnhill Road sister store out near the airport. There, John Paul was as helpful and keen to sort it all out as Kurt had been the day before, and together we deduced the additional problem, which was a poor battery connection in the top tube battery (position 2). This just needed a cleanup with WD40 degreaser. Bit of an anti-climax really, something so simple.
What John Paul had going for him in customer relations his manager had in spades in the opposite direction, with a really shitty attitude. Embarrassing really. Nothing was possible with this guy, and he brought up all sorts of puerile what-ifs as to why we couldn’t exchange my dead battery for a new one out of a new eBike that they had for sale in-store.
But reason prevailed. That, and me shelling out 700 quid that I hope will be refunded once Bosch accept the warranty claim by replacing the battery into Rutland’s stock, and I eventually did leave the store with a new battery. [Ed: I did get a full refund eventually, after about a month, and even made a $14 profit on the foreign exchange, so thank you Bosch, and thank you Rutland cycles and especially John Paul (and thank you, depreciating £)].
Cold, wet and miserable and 700 quid lighter – but in a way also reinvigorated, I then dallied in downtown Cambridge for a bit to ponder my next move. Had a lovely sausage and egg wrap at the chain eatery EAT (derr), and a watery skinny latte – which is not my cup of tea haha. My first impressions of Cambridge were not all that favourable. There were no second impressions.
But I still had no reliable navigation because the A&B’s internet wasn’t up to scratch and I couldn’t download the maps I needed; consequently, I made a bit of a meal in getting out of Cambridge and heading in the right direction to Oxford. I couldn’t use the NCN 51 bike route along the canal either since that would involve a lot of lifting the bike up and down steps at each lock and it’s too heavy for that. Apparently. Or so I was told. [Ed: I could have crossed the lock-gates with the bike, so I found out later, as there are only 2 up and 2 down steps to negotiate each time].
The cycling infrastructure definitely picked up from Bedford, with independent dedicated cycleways threading through the maze of major motorways that intersect in this part of Britain.
Tired and flustered, and numb from the cold and wet, I decided not to try to reach Oxford this day and back-tracked a few km to Milton Keynes again and searched until I found a hotel with a vacancy. This turned out to be the Premier Inn, beside Lake Furzton (though you’d hardly know there was a lake there, so poor was the visibility in such dire weather). I scored the disabled room, the only room they had left.
Tuesday 11 June 2019. Milton Keynes · Oxford |79 km|
The weather was again diabolical, and as I had only a short trip in mind, I was in no hurry to get back in the saddle this morning. But the weather only got worse the longer I waited – within a few minutes of finally setting off again, water had once more seeped through my shoes and in under my collar, so I quickly attained my habitual state of misery.
At least I now had another sign-posted route I could follow – my old friend National Cycle Network route 51 popped up again – which, with some notable missing sections – took me all the way into downtown Oxford.
I rolled into Oxford at 3 pm with plenty of battery to spare (putative range in the 160s, which is about normal for 2 good batteries, so problem solved I’d say).
After checking several Guest Houses (that never even answered the front door – you have to phone them to gain admittance, and I don’t have a working UK SIM) I took a room for 3 days in the River Hotel (the ‘River’ being the Thames), located “just 10 minutes walk from the centre” (in reality it’s 20 minutes). I’ll just chill out here for a couple of days.
-ends-
Europe 2019. Norwich to Oxford – 746 km
Europe 2019: Maastricht to Oxford |1,127 km|
Distance travelled in Europe in 2019: 4,775 km