#70 Somerset and Devon

After a couple of weeks off the eBike in Wexford, Ireland, I cycle to Rosslare Europort and take the ferry to Wales and a train to Bristol to cycle across Gloucestershire, Somerset and Devon to Plymouth through some Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

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Monday 23 September, 2019.  Yoletown to Rosslare |65 km|

[12°C, pouring rain. Moderate wind from ESE (head- and side wind).  Eurovelo 1 cycle route along quiet open-  and hedge-rowed country lanes; mostly flat, but severely potholed and patched asphalt.  The route took in: Wellingtonbridge, Duncormick, Kilmore Quay, Lady’s Island and Rosslare Harbour, where I took a ferry to Wales]

It sure was difficult getting back onto that loaded bike again after 26 days off it.  Doubly so, as I’d made a quick trip back to Maastricht to collect all the stuff I’d left there, and now was weighed down with an additional 14 kg of camping gear.  It was drizzling steadily when I set off down the lane at 9 am, and the rain never really abated in the three hours’ ride to Rosslare, instead at times became an outright downpour.

I stopped in at the local store, at what I call Wallace-town (real name Wellingtonbridge, but the Wallaces own every damn thing in it) for chicken wings and a pastry and drink and plodded on, careful to avoid the busy and narrow Newline Road, R733.  Instead, I kept strictly to the meandering ‘Norman Way’, as this section of the Eurovelo 1 Cycle Route is signposted, with a yellow helmet on maroon background.

Shortly after, at the village of Bannow, I came across another touring cyclist heading the other way.  This was young Vincente from Clermont, France.  He was just starting his circuit of Ireland as I was finishing mine.  He was very enthusiastic, and also very lightly-attired for the conditions (cycling shorts, short-sleeve lycra top and racing gloves), and appeared to be carrying hardly any gear at all in his 4 miniscule panniers.

For navigation, he was relying on the unreliable EV1 signposts and asking strangers  – good luck with that Vincente (though I  presume, unlike me, he is adept at following google maps on his smart phone).   We chatted for a bit and I filled him in on his route ahead before wishing him bon courage as we parted to continue with our respective adventures.

The sign-posted route was circuitous but I didn’t mind – I had all day to make it to the ferry – and so I relaxed and made the most of my mini-tour of South-east Ireland.  Pity about the weather though, eh.

It was pouring rain as I steamed, dripping wet and soaked through, into the almost-deserted ferry terminal building at Europort Rosslare at 12.30 pm.  There were two ferries in port, but only the Irish Ferries counter was manned (womanned actually).  She was unhelpful  – and only interested in trying to sell me a ticket for her 8.30 pm departure to Pembroke.  But I demurred, and decided to wait for the Stena Line office to open at 2 pm in case they had an earlier crossing (on-line, a 4.30 pm departure to Fishguard was mentioned; also, a Rosslare/Cherbourg option).

On reflection, Pembroke seemed enticing, but when I sat down with my smart phone I determined I wouldn’t have enough time to make it to Plymouth by Sunday to catch the last daily ferry service of the season to Spain – if that’s in fact where I wanted to go, such are the vagaries of my last-minute ‘planning’.

By contrast, the Stena Line representative, when she arrived at 2 pm, couldn’t have been more helpful.  We discussed itineraries, and established that for €47, plus €12 for the bike with Stena Line’s combined ferry-train ticket on their 6.10 pm departure to Fishguard (and not 4.30 as stated on-line) I could get all the way to Bristol by 6 am the next day, thus ‘bypassing’ at least 250 km of Wales and leaving me with plenty of  time to cycle the remaining 250-odd kilometers to Plymouth (that’s by the quickest route).  Sounded good, so I signed up.

The ferry boarding procedure at Rosslare was all laid-back and straight-forward (though I did cheat slightly and went straight from the walk-on passengers’ terminal to the head of the motorbike queue, instead of to the end of the car queues like I was maybe supposed to – [just follow the pedestrian shortcut walkway on the right after exiting the terminal building, as though you are returning to your car after taking a pee! My bike was a dead giveaway, but nobody bothered to reprimand me].

I was the first passenger on board and all those angrily-throttling motorbikes had to go at my pace.  The ship’s crew were all Polish – unless I’ve got my languages mixed up – and very helpful and efficient in lashing down the bike. There were no other bicycles on the ferry, but there were about a dozen well-decked-out motorbikes that turned out to be from the same old guys’ Welsh motorcycle club (and about 30-odd Porches from a car-club as well).  Once on board, we all sat around in our leathers (or at least, the Welsh old-boy contingent did) in the front lounge; lounging, as you do, for the boring 3½ hour trip.

I had a barely-edible (think salty brown sauce) Norwegian Kjøttkaker Meatballs and mash dinner (that came without the advertised lingonberry sauce that I was so looking forward to, I might add) and read some of my latest Scandi Noir crime novel on the Kindle e-reader.  Sleeping was not an option.

On arrival in Wales, foot passengers can walk straight from the upper ferry deck, across the covered gangway and directly into the adjoining Fishguard Harbour railway station.

Not so easy for us cyclists though!  In fact, it’s not possible at all.  I had to leave the ferry via the main loading ramp with all the other vehicles – fortunately, I was at the front again – pass through the extensive dock area, chuck a right at the roundabout outside the main gate and head back towards the ship outside the dock area.

But the road then leads up the side of a steep hill – no railway station up there!  I enquired at the kitchen side-door of a little restaurant halfway up the hill and they told me I was on the right track – I just go back down the hill a bit and there I will find the actual station.  I did too – the same 30m long, poorly lit, half-hidden-against-a-tunnel platform that I ‘d already discounted the first time I passed it.  It goes by the improbable-sounding name of ‘Fishguard & Goodwick’ (‘Abergwan ac Wdig’ in Welsh) and looked for all the world like it was a local day-time commuter stop only.

So what to do?  I waited, just me by myself.  The platform actually did have an electronic arrivals board that announced the last train for the night was due in 20 minutes and was going to….Fishguard Harbour.  Not encouraging at all!  I  was contemplating a night sleeping on the platform.

Right on time the 21.52 train tootled up, a single-carriage diesel rail-car affair.   I got on anyway, even though it was headed in the wrong direction, and with quite some difficulty too due to the bike, the step and the narrow door.  We stopped at Fishguard Harbour 3 minutes later and were there for a good 15 minutes, and nobody else got on or off, but I was relaxed by then anyway because the friendly guard explained we would shortly be returning back past ‘Fishguard and Goodwick’, and after a further 8 or so stops, would be duly arriving at Swansea at 11.57.  He seemed a bit dubious about me continuing on to Bristol, though.

It took 3 hours of stop-start swaying and ramping up to max speed followed by vertiginous braking, to cover the 100 km rail journey to Swansea.  No sleep there either.  I  think a total of maybe another 3 or 4 people got on or off along the way.

Swansea station was shutting down for the night when we arrived at midnight, but the affable duty station-master pointed out my ready and waiting train on platform number 2.  It was a sleek-looking Great Western Railways express at least a kilometer long with seating for over 1,000 passengers in 16 carriages – and space for just one bicycle.

Trouble was, it wasn’t going anywhere until 4 am!  That’s in four bleeding hours time!  Our man said he’d leave the waiting room unlocked and I could get some sleep in there, and he’d come and wake me in plenty of time to catch the train.  Nice of him.  No stretching out on the seats though – the individual squab armrests were fixed, so on the floor it was.

The coke machine had a distinctive full-bore constipated gurgle that built up to a crescendo before cutting out with a clunk on about a 5-minute cycle.  To cap it off, at 2 am the station guy allowed a crazy drug-addled couple into the waiting room as well, the punk male member of which carried out a non-stop conversation at full voice with himself until they obviously decided they needed to score more than they needed a train and scampered off at 3 am.

The bike carriage was the 3rd one from the front.  I had to unload the bike even to get it up into and through the narrow doorway.  I lashed Ziggy down in the tiny bike cubicle with his front wheel and handlebars protruded out into the passageway, but no one seemed to mind.  Deutche Bahn in Germany would have had a word to say about that, but not GWR, whose lackadaisical staff seemed to be just going through the motions.

My carriage started off with just me in it, but it began gradually filling up after each stop – we even had another bike between Cardiff and Newport, parked in the aisle –  and by the time we got to Bristol I was concerned about congestion impeding my multi-step disembarkation procedure.  But I needn’t have worried: there was plenty of time, and the polite English folk stood back until I’d made the three trips to get my bike and all the gear off onto the platform.  Not that anyone stepped in to help of course – no, too bloody polite for that!

Tuesday 24 September.   Bristol to Weston-Super-Mare |83 km|

[9-15°C; heavy rain, moderate headwinds from SW.  Urban cycleway into Bristol, then mainly busy A roads; last 10 km dedicated cycleway, the Avon Route.  The route took in: Bristol City Centre, Long Ashton, Nailsea, Clevedon, Yatton, Congresbury, St. Georges and Weston-Super-Mare]

My ‘Bristol’ train stop turned out not to be Bristol at all, but rather ‘Bristol Parkway’, which is 11 km – north, I correctly guessed – from the city , and I therefore needed to cycle through Bristol City in order to continue heading south towards Plymouth.

Considering I hadn’t slept in 24 hours by now, I managed quite well in the rain and darkness to navigate the cycle paths into Bristol proper, where I arrived at daybreak at 6.50 am.  There were surprisingly quite a few commuting cyclists out and about at this early hour for such a bleak morning.  They’re probably used to it.   Light reflecting off standing water on the road played havoc with my ability to maintain forward in an upright position momentum, I discovered.

I had an iced coffee and a burger – the tiniest so-named ‘quarter-pounder’ I’ve ever had, and unworthy of the descriptor – at Costa Coffee while hallucinating and waiting for Cycle Republic bike shop next door to open at 8.00 am –  I still needed a Rohloff oil-change kit after Evers Cycle Shop in Maastricht dudded me on the quantity of flushing and refill oils I required: my gearbox was half-empty.

Though friendly, the bike shop couldn’t assist me, and neither could pretentious Evans Cycles around the corner, having neither the oil nor a new tyre to replace my by-now very fragile original Schwalbe ‘Rock Razor’ on the front wheel.

It looked like an interesting city to spend some time in, Bristol – a big city of 700,000-odd inhabitants.  But I was pressed for time to meet that ferry connection in Plymouth, and so I decided to push on further to the Bristol Channel coast before finding a refuge to stay in and catch up on my missing sleep.

It was raining heavily as I found my way onto NCN Route 33, the so-called Avon route, out of Bristol.  I nearly came to grief a couple of times too.  It was the morning rush hour and I had to use the busy A370 and B133 roads as far as Yatton to get out of town, where there seemed to be a different rule for cyclists at roundabouts than in the rest of the world, ie. that bicycles have absolutely no right-of-way at roundabouts whatsoever, and I nearly got skittled twice. Being generous, you could say the drivers were a trifle inconsiderate, but personally I think they were vicious nasty bastards 😐.

I hadn’t slept for 30 hours by this stage, and I’d also eaten a whole lot of junk food and imbibed an awful lot of coffee, but I won’t tell you the significance of the picture below:  Oh, what the hell, why not? It all came to a head with an overwhelming urge to defecate, which, for posterity, occurred next to a farmer’s wooden-slatted gate (for support) near the sign below, and in several thousand years’ time there’ll be a perfect fossilized replica of my colon still there!  ‘Nuff said.

My cycling was erratic in the diabolical conditions – the wind was gusting at 25km/h into my face by now – and, as you’ll  be able to see from my track, above, I did a couple of dead-ends, and once even a full circle without realizing it at the time.

The batteries were very low by now after 100 km since Yoletown, so I stopped at a gym that is housed under the grandstand of Clevedon Town FC where the gym manager, quite begrudgingly, I have to say, deigned to allow me to charge up for an hour.  The rain really came clattering down while I was there too – the heaviest downpour of the day –  so I was rather pleased to be well out of it.

The place where I finally stopped for the day, Weston-Super-Mare, is one of those quintessentially-English seaside resorts.  Like Blackpool.  Well it was to me anyway, but then again what do I know.

It has the ubiquitous fun pier of course, and also plenty of amusement arcades to take your mind off the weather; fish and chip shops on every corner, and surrounded by massive ‘holiday resorts’, (aka caravan park/ campgrounds), and of course, ye olde worlde decaying geriatric hotel/ guest houses strung out along the strand.  It was to one of these, the venerable Sandringham, that I now decamped.  Zimmer frames were the main means of lobby locomotion, and mobility scooters stood ready to tackle the outdoor stuff.  I loved it!

But alas The Sandringham was full, and so I had to settle for next door at The York, where the clientele, being merely in their 50s and 60s, were a good 20 years younger.  Music du jour in the York’s entertainment bar was a one-lady acoustically-enhanced ensemble enthusiastically belting out passable renditions of such favourite hits as “Walk Like a Man” and “These Boots Are Made For Walking” and 101 other 60s party tunes, to the spoon-tapping, head-bobbing enthrallment of a nevertheless surprisingly listless audience.  Priceless!

A Sainsbury’s or M&S there was not, so I had to make do with the Tesco Express equivalent – crappy lemon chicken and crispy bacon strips (2 for £2) washed down with JD and Dr. Pepper, and followed by ‘antique aniseed jellies’ (you know, those stubby little soft black jelly cylinders encrusted in blue or pink 100s-and-1000s).  I was amused to note, though, that the York was economising by recycling their Sunday lunch and Xmas dinner menus for everyday use.  Kinda weird, that.

Wednesday 25 September, 2019.  Weston-Super-Mare to Warren Bay |66 km|

[Weather fair at first, relatively speaking: 12-15°C, not much wind initially but then fierce from the south later.  I was heading south.   Hardly any rain to begin with, but it did pick up enough to warrant the rain-gear by midday.  All types of road conditions, from busy A roads, to a muddy beach, to quiet narrow country lanes, to steep single- and double-track MTB flinty stones.  The route took in: Highbridge, Huntspill, Bridgewater, Combwich, Stogursey, Hinkley nuclear power station, Holford, West Quantoxhead, Watchet and Warren Bay]

The urban bike paths out of Weston through the ‘burbs and outlying housing estates were a bit of trial and error, but Ziggy generally did the right thing and got me there in the end after only a couple of attempts to put me on to non-existent footpaths that I studiously ignored.  I then picked up NCN33 again through some nice countryside, but the stupid anally-retentive gates every 300m designed by a schizophrenic bike-hater made me wish that I hadn’t.  I think it was the polite English way of saying “actually, we’d rather prefer you didn’t cycle through here”.

But I pretty soon got onto flat polder land populated with an impressive number of massive caravan parks.  I even saw a touring cyclist camped at one.

The polders lead me on to the beach proper, onto soft muddy sand that was really hard-slogging for the 8 or so kilometers to Burnham-on-Sea, even though the tide was well out and the sand should have been compacted, I’d have thought.

The way out of Burnham, on the A38 and A39 – which are busy roads with no shoulder, no verge and very rude drivers – was difficult. At Huntspill on the A38 I got a front tyre puncture caused by a wire fragment penetrating the tube when I jumped the bike off a kerb – at least, I think that’s what did it.

It took an hour to fix the puncture and to find and remove the piece of wire  that caused it, which I did at the street-side picnic tables that pass for the beer garden of the Crossways Inn, while the instant crowd of local retired folk were filing past into the pub for their lunchtime meal specials.  They didn’t tip any small change into a collection tin for me, but condescendingly looked as though they might have done, had I actually had a collection tin.

Well, after I’d gotten going again roadside signs invited me into the Anchor pub at Combwich, which was a bugger to find and was closed anyway, so on I plodded until I arrived at the lovely village of Holford where I had a late lunch at ‘The Plough’ from 2.15 to 3.30 while charging-up (steak and Guinness stew with peas and mash, £13).

Then it was immediately on to a very steep and very rugged MTB single-track to the moor along the ridge-line and on towards Williton.  It was touch-and-go there for a while as to whether I’d have to turn around or  not.  My confidence in Ziggy’s navigational abilities was waning at that stage.  A farmer’s gate that I had to dismount for to open, on an extremely steep and rubbly section, almost did me in, as did a couple of deep ruts filled with water that I had to wade through up to my shins.

But this was the Quantock Hills AONB (Area Of Natural Beauty) and the ride itself, once I got comfortable with my navigation after having chatted to a local out walking her dogs, was very enjoyable, as were the views over the desolate barren hilltops.

Just before the downhill into Williton, though, I veered off to the north and made a bee-line back to the Bristol Channel coast again at Watchet.  A couple of kilometers past Watchet I pulled into the Warren Bay Holiday Village where, for a rather steep £13, I was given a powered tent site.

The beach was interesting to me because it is a well-known fossil site, and I did actually find a small fragment with shell impressions in it.

I even got to use my new gas camp stove for dinner – tinned beef stew, packet instant noodles and milk coffee, plus creamed rice and custard straight out of the tin.

Thursday 26 September, 2019.  Warren Bay to Northam |111 km|

[Patchy rain and 12°C.  A39 road pretty much all the way.  Not much traffic.  The route took in: Minehead, Porlock, Countisbury, Lynmouth, Beggar’s Rest, Barnstaple and Northam]

It rained a lot during the night, but it was a cloudless and sunny morning that greeted me and I was off quite early.  It was a good run on the A39 with some coastal views, then through the town of Minehead to Porlock, which is a pretty tourist village where I enjoyed a ham sandwich, then immediately up a monstrous great hill: 4 km at up to 25% incline, billed as ‘the steepest A road in Britain’.  I had to stop halfway up for a bus coming down that had to use the whole of the road to negotiate a hairpin on the steepest section.

The road then closely followed the coast (but most of the time not so close that you could actually  see it), with a big drop from Countisbury down into Lynmouth.

The brakes were very hot by the time I got down into Lynmouth – so hot, in fact, that I can no longer open my phone using my thumbprint, because I burnt it off when I pinched the brake between thumb and forefinger to see how hot it was!  Never mind, it’ll grow back.

It was then a very long and arduous climb on A39 through dense temperate forest back up out of the narrow valley of the Lyn River that Lynmouth is at the mouth of, if that makes any sense (it does to me.  Read it slowly).

Barnstaple, located on the River Taw, was a disappointment (unattractive) but after almost 1,900m of climbing, I was seriously needing a rest.  So I gave it a few more kilometers heading west along the coast towards Padstow, looking for a viable campground, but then chickened out and back-tracked a few kilometers to a campground stored in Ziggy’s ‘Navigate/ Points of Interest/ Accommodation/ Campgrounds’ list.  This turned out to be an abandoned caravan park called Marshford located in the Barnstaple suburb of Northam/ Appledore.  But the power was still connected, and a long-term resident there said sure, it’s ok to stay, so I set up near him.

I nipped down to the local minimart to get food for my dinner – tinned Irish beef stew, Thai noodle hotpot, cider and Jack Daniel with coffee.  I managed to sit on my plastic rum bottle and split it, but glued up the resultant leak near the neck with the superglue I had bought in Wexford to fix the bike computer cowling.  Useful stuff that!

Friday 27 September, 2019.  Northam to Plymouth |121 km|

[Again, another drizzly day. 12 – 15°C.  The route took in:  Bideford, Meeth, Okehampton, Tavistock, Lydford and Plymouth]

So, I had a free camp last night – with electricity! It rained most of the night, but I managed to pack up at 8.30 between showers.  I crossed the Torridge River at Bideford (pron: Bid-de-fd) and found myself on the compacted dirt Tarkwa Trail for 25 km through parkland for most of it, then lovely narrow country lanes to Okehampton and finally on NCN27 to Lydford.

It was wet and miserable most of the way to Lydford (but a great ride, eh!) so I stopped at Lydford for a couple of hours to thaw out at an authentic English country pub called the Castle Inn.  The atmosphere, with the well-heeled locals and tourists and their beautiful dogs (the pub won “best pub for dogs in 2018”) was great and so was the Venison Bourguignon.

I was hard to get back out of that cosy dog-friendly pub into the horrid weather again, but after the first 100m it was back into ‘ride’ frame of mind on the Plym Valley Trail all the way into downtown Plymouth (or at least it would have been if I’d stayed on course – the last couple of kilometers I had to battle through the peak hour traffic after I lost the trail somehow (but found it again right at the end).

In Plymouth, I checked out the Hotel on the Hoe – they were full but Aaron there put me onto John at Kynance House just up the street, where I took a fairly ordinary basement room for 2 nights at £57.50 per night.

On the Saturday, I had a look around the town centre, and the maritime zone called the Barbican and worked on this blog.  Plymouth is a town that thinks its big – the pedestrianized shopping streets are too wide for the architecture, which is too ‘1970s cheap’ to be interesting, but the port area does retain some 16th-century charm.

On Sunday I watched Australia get narrowly beaten by Wales at rugby in the Hotel on the Hoe together with a bunch of friendly Welsh supporters, and then had to rush back to check-out from Kynance House by 11am.  And so by midday I was waiting at the head of the queue for the Brittany Ferry gates to open: by 4 pm we were all ready to board and depart almost on-time at 4.45pm.

The ferry, Pont Aven of 2,600 passenger-capacity, only arrived at 4.15, so it was an amazingly quick turn-around.  There were 5 bicycles altogether on this 23-hour crossing to Santander: a short little old lady on a brand new bike with 4 brand new panniers, who was hoping to ride 35 km per day to southern Portugal; a bald guy in lycra with no luggage at all to speak of who was racing off to Seville; another fully-loaded camping cycle tourist (a slow-speaking young guy from Lincolnshire who was cycling to Huelva) and a young German lad, also fully-loaded and cycling to Faro in southern Portugal.  There were also about 100 motorbikes.

I had an inside cabin, number 5170, to myself and I managed to sleep/doze in the cabin from 6 pm until 8 am.  The lamb dinner and Surimi salad for £18 were ok, but the ‘free’ WiFi didn’t work at all in the cabin and hardly worked elsewhere.  In spite of everyone in Plymouth warning me the passage would be very rough and might even be cancelled because of an impending storm, such was not the case – the sea was almost glassy and the weather fine (at least it was when I popped my head out at 9 am).

Monday 30 September.  Santander |No cycling|

I was thrilled to bits to be back in Spain – just look at the weather compared to England! – but it was difficult re-acclimatizing to the culture.

I had no mobile telephone service because my Irish SIM had expired, and on top of that I’d forgotten to download the Spanish maps onto the bike GPS so I had no idea where I was going.  But eventually, after wandering aimlessly around downtown Santander for an hour or so, I found a ‘Valor’-brand chocolatery that had internet and for €4.60 (an expensive glass of choco-milk!) I did manage to download the Bosch maps onto the GPS at least, and from that I managed to locate a campground nearby.

This campground was called Camping Cabo Major, at the western entrance to Santander Bay, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.  I mean, there was nothing wrong with it, and there were two restaurants next door to choose from as well, but, typical of council-run campgrounds I’ve found, the people were quite dogmatic and very unhelpful.

They even employ a guy (and his shift goes until 10pm!) just to make sure no one is pilfering electricity.  His job is to unlock the power cabinets every time someone wants to connect or disconnect an appliance – in my case the bike battery charger – after checking each time that you’re entitled to do so.

Both the ‘evening’ lady and the ‘morning’ lady on reception got very stroppy with me – the first one when I wanted to pay straightaway (€14.10 – site €4.90; one person €4.90; electricity €4.30) because I though I might want to leave early before the office opened ,  and the second one went ballistic because she thought I wasn’t going to pay at all.  Anyway, dinner across the road at El Barco was ok (even though the kitchen doesn’t open until 10 pm), and I did have an uninterrupted night’s sleep.

-ends-

#70  Yoletown (Ireland) to Santander (Spain) via south-west England from Bristol to Plymouth |446 km|

2019 Europe so far |9,279 km|

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Bike odometer: 14,242 km