I arrive in a wet and dreary England and set off up the east coast towards Scotland. The countryside is pleasant, the people are nice and I was truly in “England’s green & pleasant land” [ThomasBlake,1808]
Tuesday 3 May 2022. Harwich to Newmarket |123 km|
[Mostly cold, wet and miserable. At least it wasn’t windy].
Well fortified by the €24 Stena Line meal I had last night before we’d even left the dock, and from gobbling up all the free goodies from the mini-bar afterwards, I slept like a log all the way to Norwich. My first views of England through the porthole of my cosy cabin were, however, not at all encouraging: dismal grey skies and pattering rain awaited me.
I was the first one off the boat – and no problems at customs either, just waved straight on through – but the border official in his little kiosk took an inordinate interest in me and spent a long time flipping through my passport and questioning me minutely about my travel history and intentions. Hell, I didn’t know -I was just riding my bike north!
I was relaxed because I knew I’d committed no crime, and very polite because I know how these things can go sometimes, but he seemed determined to break me down to admitting to some malfeasance that could get me locked away. Anyway, after a couple of minutes of this, and the queue behind me starting to build up, he simply stamped me in and ushered me on with a shrug. What was all that about?
I stopped at a roundabout just out of the gated dock area to get my bearings and punch in a likely destination to the GPS. I’d already seen the first NCR 1 sign for National Cycle Route No.1 that I was notionally going to follow all the way up the east coast of England to Scotland so I knew I was on the right track, but it’s good to have GPS back-up in case of road closures or missed signposts. I boldly set off – and then made exactly the same mistake as I did 3 years ago (see #64, Tuesday 4 June, 2019) by following NCR 1 onto a dead-end spit of land at Felixstowe where a so-called bike ferry is supposed to take you across the River Stour estuary to all points north. Well, that ferry wasn’t in active service in 2019 and still wasn’t working in 2022, and there’s still no way I’d be able to get a loaded bike up onto it anyway.
Thus chastened, I retraced my steps and in the drizzling rain pulled into a Greggs coffee-shop just about where I’d started out from on my English journey. It was still only 7.00 am and it had just opened. I do like a Greggs, and with their equivalent of an Egg McMuffin and a hot chocolate under my belt, and after repositioning my mirror from the left-hand onto the right-hand handlebar and donning all my wet-weather gear, I set off to the quaintly-named town of Bury St. Edmonds for no other reason than that it was in the general direction of Scotland and I happened to like the name.
The going was a little hillier in England than I’d become used to lately and I really chewed up the batteries. They already had 35-km on them from my trip to the ferry on the other side of the North Sea yesterday, and at 48-km on the day’s clock (and so 83 km on the batteries) I stopped at a cafe in the quaint-enough village of Hadleigh for a proper English breakfast, another hot chocolate and, more importantly, a battery recharge. And I walked back aways down the main street to a delightful old-fashioned ironmongers to buy the UK power adaptor I needed.
When I got to Bury St. Edmonds I stayed long enough to buy a ‘3’ SIM card with 50 GB on it for £20. This turned out to be not such a smart idea because ‘Three’ is only a minor player in the British telephony market and there are hardly any ‘3’ outlets in the UK, at least compared to their competitors, and so basically zero chance of getting any assistance.
And I needed assistance becuse the damn thing didn’t work. The guy who sold it to me lied when he said the SIM would be operational within 3 hours max. It took a whole 3 days before I could get a connection (maybe that’s why they call it “3”?), and that was after haranguing ‘3’ stores – whenever I could find them – all the way to Hull. The salesman had ‘forgotten’ to expedite my connection through their system, was the excuse, and it wasn’t rectified until I could produce all the contract documents in person. The phone is important to me for route planning and booking ahead etc.
You can see that my route took a serious 20 km deflection south-west at place called Tuddenham. This is because I realised I’d not be able to get too much further on the batteries and I thought I’d better head to a larger town like Newmarket where there was bound to be more chance of securing accommodation (and I couldn’t call ahead either could I, dammit!).
In Newmarket, which is quite a big and prosperous horse-racing town and therefore has a lot of hotels, I stayed at a pub called the White Hart Hotel where I had an OK room (just OK – it’s three single beds on coasters were a laugh) for – ouch – £110, but at least did get to watch Liverpool beat Villareal 3-2 (5-2 aggregate) in the second leg of their Champion’s League encounter. Ziggy, my faithful steed, had the better deal I think – all night in the function room on the charge. I was concerned about the security down there with my gear all alone in an unlocked room just off the side-exit door to the hotel. They said fine, in that case I could take him upstairs into the room with me if I wanted. There’s no way I was going to lug the beast up that rickety mediaeval staircase and back down again so he had to take his chances chained to the furniture in the function room.
The White Hart pub itself has a lot of character – the sort of pub I’d like to go to anytime – but the clientele (there were only a few of them on a non-descript Tuesday afternoon, maybe half-a-dozen or so) were… how shall I put it …uncouth drunken foul-mouthed slags, who’d have been thrown out of any pub in Australia. Their men were evil-looking fringe-dwellers too and clearly needing their daily fix in a hurry, but relative to their wim’n, somewhat quieter.
So I retired early to the sanctity of my room to watch the aformentioned football match and ate my pub burger and chips sitting on the bed. At least I did have internet access in the room and was able to do some correctional route planning for my ride on to Lincoln next day by making a note of the names of as many villages I would be passing through as I could so that I could check-off my progress along the way: Soham – Ely – Little Downham – Pynoor (Hundred Foot Bank) – Wethey – Upwell – Wisbech – Tydd St Mary – Holbeach – Fosdyk – Boston – Tattershall Bridge – Bardney – Lincoln. Phew! Great names, eh?
Wednesday 4 May 2022. Newmarket to Boston |141 km|
[Threatening rain all day, which finally arrived in late afternoon when I was nearly at Boston].
Well, I didn’t quite get as far as that town of Lincoln that I’d marked down yesterday, but I did make a good-enough job of it as far as Boston. 141 kilometers is about as far as I want to go in a day.
Neither Ely nor Wisbech had a ‘3’ shop so I had no one to remonstrate with and was still phone-less. I stopped at Wisbech anyway, at 1pm, for a lasagna (but really for a quick charge-up) at Britannia Cafe . Then, a few miles further on at Welney, there was the unsettling incident of having to wait in a line of traffic for 40-minutes while the police pulled a car out of the canal at the scene of a fatal accident. I’m not being glib about it at all and it’s very sad to realise someone had died there earlier that day. I’d worked my way to the head of the held-up traffic and was talking to the senior police officer who was clearly shaken up.
Once again I had difficulty finding accomodation, this time in Boston, but after the 4th time of asking I did find a vacancy at the Quayside Hotel for £68. At one point I was even reconciled to sleeping in my wet tent but the local caravan park I went to out of town was out of business.
It was clearly fiesta-time in Boston as they were celebrating the annual Boston Mayflower Festival. The small central business district was clogged with buskers, funfair rides, food stalls and side show attractions. It being the ‘400th anniversary’ of the original 1620 voyage of the Mayflower (I know, I know, but two years late due to COVID) that took the first settlers to America, it was probably a bigger event than normal. [Ed. The Mayflower never actually sailed from Boston, but the first clandestine plans for the voyage were hatched there].
The Quayside Hotel was a little way removed from all the festivities going on and it was starting to rain again so I never went back to check out the fairgrounds.
Three electricity linesmen were drinking away the afternoon in the front bar “till knock-off time” and we had a beer together while the barmaid arranged the room for me, that turned into another beer, that turned into a bit of a drinking session (for them not me, I just stuck with the one, ok maybe 2, beers) until, true to their word, they suddenly upped sticks and jumped in their work vehicles to go back to clock-off from work. That was around 6 pm, and I’d been with them for an hour or so. [Hmm. Drink-driving? Fatal accident this morning? I’m beginning to get the picture].
The pub food was good too – a delicate seafood linguini – but unfortunately no pay TV channel this time to watch the Wedneday night’s Champion’s League football game.
Thursday 5 May 2022. Boston to Hull |140 km|
[A balmy 17°C today, and even a bit sunny! An uneventful day riding through rolling farmland on mainly minor roads]
The Quayside Hotel deal included breakfast and I really pigged out on OJ, crumpet, raisin toast, butter, marmalade, raisin roll, grapes, preserved fruit, cold beef, cheese and coffee 😊.
Before I left town I had to run a couple of errands. The first was that my brakes had failed completely on coming into Boston the day before and so I rushed around to Halford’s Bike Shop just around the corner from the pub before it even opened at 8.00 am to get new disc brake pads fitted. The grumpy old bike mechanic, Chris, was ‘far too busy’ fussing about having his morning coffee to install them (they can be a bit tricky sometimes, the brake pads that is) but he sold me a set (for £8, front and rear), loaned me a screw driver and spanner and pointed me in the direction of the trolley pick-up shelter in the car park where I could do it myself. So I did, and it was quite easy really – it only took me 20 minutes or so. I’d mostly been worried about having to bleed the hydraulic lines and topping up the brake fluid but this turned out to be unnecessary.
Next stop was “3”. It took me a while to find their store tucked away in an alley hidden behind a row of fairground kiosks, and then I had to wait till 9.30 for them to open up, only to be told rather unsympathetically that “your bundle is working as it should – you just have to wait the 3 days (still one left) before it activates”. The moral of the story is: Don’t buy THREE!
It’s not quite what it’s cracked up to be, by the way, the Lincolnshire Wolds. I was rather disappointed. Sure, there were one or two short sections that were interesting, especially the one above, riding, together with a horse-riding school and families of day-trippers, along a 5-km section of abandoned railway line, but generally it was just expansive views of gently rolling canola crops while travelling along unprotected ‘A’ roads with hurtling traffic.
I started looking around in earnest for accommodation as soon as I got over the Humber Bridge at Hessle. In fact, I’d checked out several places just before the bridge too, inlcuding two caravan parks that were closed.
In Hull The Gilson Hotel, a rather fancy establishment in the town centre took me in, and for £110 I got a room with a view. Sort of.
Marks and Spencer in the nearby St. Stephen’s Shopping Centre provided sustenance from their ready-to-eat section. I tried a couple of bars-morphing-into-night- clubs later but ‘later’ was too late for me, and so I had a quiet evening, being just about the only customer propping up the bar(s).
– ends –
2022 in Europe so far: 2,575 km in 25 days (22 days of cycling)
Nights in hotel 13
Night on ferry 1
Nights in tent 12
New bike defects/ repairs:
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- Rohloff oil change (Toulouse)
- Repairs to rear kickstand (Toulouse)
- 2 punctures rear, 4 punctures front (all between Toulouse and Agde)
- 2 new tubes (Montelimar)
- Two new Ortlieb Front Roller panniers (€140 Koblenz)
- 2 sets new brake pads (Boston)
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