#64 London to Wales

After a week in London I head west back towards Oxford and beyond into Wales through the Brecon Beacons to the Irish Sea coast at Aberystwyth  (and if you’re wondering how to pronounce that, its “Aber-ist-with”).

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Wednesday 19 to Wed. 26 June, 2019. In London |No riding|

I stayed at an Airbnb house in Brixton Hill (Lambeth) that is located on a quiet street near the large housing estate of Roupell Park in a predominately black (Jamaican) neighbourhood.  The house was fine but very shabby in a bachelor-share-house kind of way.  It was purely a commercial arrangement for the owner, and I was never made to feel entirely welcome.

And of course now that I wasn’t riding, the sun came out for the duration – thankfully so too, as I could happily do the 15-minute walk into Brixton proper, or the 5-minute walk to the bus into Central London, each day.  I bought a nice pair of Italian leather shoes and a light-weight pure wool blue suit and a shirt – all from Oxfam in Pimlico and all for under 50 quid.  And they almost fitted too, except that I had to lie down to latch-up the trousers.  Guess I’m not a size 32 anymore.

On the Sunday, I switched to the Grand Hotel (aka Club Quarters Hotel) in Northumberland Avenue just off Trafalgar Square, to attend a conference there.   A stuffy hotel to look at to be sure, but with very considerate and helpful staff.  Jake, the receptionist, let Ziggy proudly reside in the luggage room just off the front entrance, after first telling me I had to take him up 4 floors in the lift and keep him with me in my room.  So that was nice.

What with all that conferencing going on, I didn’t get much sight-seeing done.  Just the usual tripping around and dining out with my colleagues in Pall Mall, Leicester Square, Chinatown etc., and plenty of ales in those good old English pubs. I did get to the National Portrait Gallery at least, and checked out the BP 2019 Portrait Award exhibition.

 

 

Wednesday 26 June, 2019.  London · Dorchester-on-Thames |115 km|

I wasn’t able to get away from the Grand Hotel until 11am and by then the weather had returned to looking decidedly iffy, although in the end the rain did just about hold off for most of the day.  It was great fun cycling through the heart of London to Putney Bridge guided by Ziggy’s GPS, where I hoped to pick up the Thames River cycleway all the way to Oxford, and it was not at all scary or dangerous as I’d been lead to believe.

At Putney Bridge I found the required cycleway, NCN Route 4, easily enough, but then promptly lost it again.  Turns out it is not a continuous path at all, and there are a whole lot of deviations and missing sections needing to be filled in to more-or-less keep to it.  Still, Ziggy’s GPS saw me through in the end, though the section out past Heathrow and almost as far as Windsor along an uneven and very narrow footpath facing the traffic on a busy road was quite unappealing and very dangerous.  Tendrils of blackberry bush were reaching out to slash the unwary face or arm, and the 4” kerb drop-off onto the main thoroughfare was precariously close.

From Windsor, the quality of the route picked up as far as Henley-on-Thames and it was quite delightful cycling once again, but then there were some more awful bits until the Chiltern Hills.

I only made it as far as the village of Dorchester-on-Thames – the aim had been to get to at least Oxford – before deciding to call it a day even though it was still only quite early, around 4pm.  This is the new me, you see, deciding not to rush onwards at all costs but to take it slow and smell the roses, so to speak.

Glad I did too – after several ‘sorry, full-house’ refusals, I ended up staying at the characterful White Hart Hotel (yet another one of that name), built circa 1690 and now suitably warped and delightfully sinuous.  Everyone was super-friendly too – the owner even chopped the asking price down from £105 initially, then to 95 and then finally to 75 with breakfast thrown in after a little bit of banter at his tiny reception desk.  The place was jam-packed that evening, with the refined and well-dressed local golf club members holding a ‘do’ of some sort; the ring-in bar staff, uni students with no training, could barely cope.  I got into a deep and boozy conversation with Ryan, a travelling Welsh agricultural machinery mechanic from Pembrokeshire, and we downed an awful lot of pints together until the midnight curfew, ie. when the publican wanted to go to bed.

And the breakfast was not to be missed either, with proper à la carte service, even though I was feeling pretty ropey and hungover – my best English breakfast yet!

Thursday 27 June, 2019.  Dorchester · Birdlip |119 km|

I didn’t cover a tremendous amount of ground today, but worked hard for it even so.  It was warm – dare I say, hot even, in the mid- to high-20s – and the factor 50 sunscreen was liberally applied throughout the day.   Overall, it was a much better ride than yesterday too.  Travelling west into and then out of Oxford and across the Cotswolds was great (just like my north-south traverse 2 weeks ago).

I stopped in the Cotswolds for a bite to eat at the pretty village of Sherborne where the chunky and earthy ham sandwich was something to behold, even if the proprietors were a trifle fractious.

I was making for Gloucester but had completely run out of battery after 115 km by the time I got to the few houses that make up the village of Winstone.  There, a retired couple in their rather sumptuous abode chatted about their holiday houses in Portugal and Majorca while letting me charge-up for 40 minutes or so, giving me enough extra power to get me…well, not very far….but at least the 3 miles of back-tracking to Birdlip, where there is at least a pub – the Royal George – but absolutely nothing else in the way of commercial enterprises – nothing at all (and I did look too).

I’d actually passed through Birdlip two Saturdays ago, on June 15, and on that occasion refueled and recharged at the Polo pub about 3 miles further north up the busy A417 road (but in the wrong direction for Gloucester this time around).  Disappointingly, the Royal George dinner was that oh-so-typical plastic pub grub with a fancy description (pity you can’t just eat the laminated pictogram menu, huh) and the WIFI didn’t work either.  Ah well…the £56 I paid for the room is about par for the course in this part of the world.

Friday 28 June, 2019.  Birdlip · Brecon |138 km|

Wow!  This was my best day’s riding yet!  Or maybe I’m just getting more appreciative.

Straight out of the Royal George at 8am it was onto a steep and very rough downhill bridle path, the Cotswold Way, that continued for several kilometres, with more very steep 16° to 25° sections both up and down but overall steadily climbing, out of a pretty valley to the quaintly-named Upton-St. Leonards before a massive downhill dive into Gloucester city.

But not a pretty sight, Gloucester, and at 9am the three weed-smoking 15-year-old tough boys in school uniform and the chubby tattooed girl also in school uniform riding her bike to school spoke volumes.  So I basically just hurried right on through.

Once through Gloucester and across the Severn River, it was the A40 for 10 km – not great – then onto quiet country lanes in hilly and picturesque countryside and down the beautiful Wye valley to the county seat of Monmouth, a lovely little town.

After yesterday’s close call of almost completely running out of power in the middle of nowhere, I took no chances today and stopped at 12.30 to charge up for an hour and a ½ at a pub in Raglan just in case.

Then, after first missing it completely because of inaccuracies in the bike route I had downloaded, and having ridden to the top of a steep ridge before bothering to ask directions of a local resident, I came to realize that the Brecon-to-Monmouthshire Canal I’d just passed down below would take me the full 40 km all the way into Brecon town.

It was late by the time I rolled into Brecon and took a cheap (£38) room at the Gremlin Hotel – probably not the best choice I could have made though, or so I noticed afterwards, as I’d misjudged where the centre of town was and I was at the ‘wrong’ end of town and a good walk away from anywhere.  I had dinner in a Thai restaurant up the street that was also quite ordinary.

Saturday 29 June 2019.  Brecon · Llanilar (Aberystwyth) |152 km|

I had to wait around in Brecon next morning for the local bike shop to open.  Although my rear brake still worked fine it had been squeaking badly for 2 days unless I kept gentle pressure on the lever.  I thought it must be the caliper not retracting properly due to gunk in the piston, but then yesterday the front brake started doing it too.    I couldn’t believe I needed new brake pads already, as they’d just been replaced 2,200 km ago after getting 8,800 km of life on the first set, but it turned out that both front and rear pads were indeed completely worn out, and so I replaced them in Brecon.

So, with the bike fixed I finally got away from Brecon at 10am along the ‘Old Coach Trail’, a part of NCN Route 8 that I kept crisscrossing all the way to Holyhead, for what turned out to be another great day’s riding.

It was hilly alright, and I had to stop at the Esso/Greggs truck stop at Llanwrthwl for 2 hours as the battery showed only 28km range left on the lowest power usage setting, after only a mere 55km travelled.  The route I took was mainly along the verge-less, shoulder-less and moderately busy road B4520, but I felt quite safe and generally resisted all the bike route markers that seemed to be indicating a much longer and hillier route.

I probably would have been better off taking NCN 81 to Rhayader and going around the eastern side of Elan Valley, I realised from looking at the map afterwards.  This is because the trail I did take was blocked by a rockfall a few kilometers before where I would have rejoined route 81 anyway, and I consequently had a long-winded back-track to get across the dam wall to go north along the western side of the reservoir that fills Elan Valley. But it was truly scenic along there, and afforded me a proper taste of the Brecon Beacon experience I’m sure.

I was getting very low on battery power again with 10-or-so kilometers still to go before Aberystwyth, so when in the village of Llanfihangel-y-Creuddyn a guy named Mike who was trimming his front hedge suggested I might like to stop and charge up for a bit, I took him up on his offer.  Mike is 76-years old and an ebike enthusiast himself.  His directions on the best way to get to Aberystwyth were too complicated to remember but I wish I’d paid more attention.  The town is hemmed into a narrow valley between two long mountain ridges, and I made a real meal out of it by crossing both of these ridges and then having to cross back over the southern one again to get there.

I would still have been alright battery-wise, except that I chewed up another 15km-worth scurrying all over Aberystwyth town looking for accommodation.  I must have tried at least 30 hotels and guesthouses, but everywhere was completely booked out.  Saturday nights in coastal resorts in summer after a short spell of exceptional weather are like that in the UK.   So I was getting desperate until finally, after over an hour of fruitless searching, Angela who runs the Queensbury guesthouse said there was a complete 3-bedroom cottage available 4 miles out of town for £120 for the night, so I grabbed it.

I had to go round to the Four Seasons Hotel (where I’d already been and been rejected) to pay and get the key, which I thought was rather odd (I suspect Angela’s family own the cottage but sub it out to the Four Seasons for short-term letting, but that the Four Seasons can’t really be bothered with it).  No one there could give me concise directions on how to get to this cottage either, so eventually it was agreed one of the Four Seasons staff would drive me out there in her car to show me.  Just as well because I never would have found it otherwise.  It turned out to be 7 miles (11 km) away, not 4, in a country hamlet called Llanilar.  I thought it would be impossible for me to find my way back again on the bike by myself, and anyway it was too busy and dangerous a road to risk in the dark (it was already 9.00pm), plus I’d not eaten all day and needed to buy some provisions, and besides there was virtually no battery left in the bike to get me there across that almighty ridge again.

But the Four Seasons refused to give me my money back so I was stuck with it.   To cut a long story short, I quickly got some ready-meal food at Morrisons supermarket and, nursing the battery out to Llanilar with my tired old legs that had already done 160 km for the day, made it to the cottage just as the battery finally gave out.   And not even a G&T to wind down with!

-ends-

#64  Across England and Wales:  London to Aberystwyth.  524 km

Europe 2019.  Across England:  (Maastricht) then Harwich to Aberystwyth |2,239 km|

 

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Europe 2019:  5,907 km

Bike tachymeter: 10,870 km