Riding north along the Yorkshire coast (that’s East Riding of Yorkshire and North Yorkshire) is well worth the effort. The terrain is varied and interesting and no matter that the weather doesn’t often cooperate, the scenery makes up for it and the natives are friendly. This was the first time for me in most of the places I visited along here, and doing it at a leisurely pace on an eBike makes it all the better.
Friday 6 May 2022. Hull to Whitby |129 km|
Hull (more correctly ‘Kingston-Upon-Hull’ apparently) turns out to be a rather interesting city with a nice vibe to it. It figured it must have been wealthy once, going by the large number of ornate victorian buildings I saw in the centre. Victorian?? What would I know – we call any old building in Australia ‘Victorian’ because that’s about as old as Australia gets, building-wise.
The ones in Hull could have been 100’s of years older for all I knew. [Probably not, so I just discovered, since 95% of Hull was destroyed by bombing in the Second World War].
The morning’s ride was going along okay at first, until the GPS completely zombified itself into an endless loop of route recalculation and I was riding blind all the way to Bridlington for 2 hours. I’m guessing it didn’t like me being on the A165 road, which is verbotten in the Bosch eBike Connect world, and couldn’t find an alternative route. This is where having a working iPhone comes in handy because it enabled me to ‘see’ better routes to Whitby and eventually directed me on to quiet B roads through hilly countryside that the GPS could be happy with.
I had a very nice lunch at ‘The Hideout kitchen cafe and bar’ in Bridlington from 1.30 pm to 3.00 pm. The weather was okay-enough to sit outside at the corner barrel table shown in the link for their TripAdvisor listing.
From Bridlington, I soon got onto the Cinder Track, another abandoned railway line, all the way to Whitby. At first it was really good, but after the old smuggler’s village of Robin Hood’s Bay it deteriorated badly, with huge potholes and some steep sections as much as 34° (that one was down, fortunately, the steepest up section was only 20°).
Scarborough looked like a nice seaside town but I didn’t dally there at all and kept to the high ground behind the town proper as I passed by.
In Whitby I found a very ordinary room in a very fine hotel for – ouch! – £136 at the Royal Hotel. It’s my own fault really – I’d actually found an open caravan park at High Hawsker, some 5km before Whitby, for $£25 (or a ‘pod’ for £36) but, well, it was starting to rain so I didn’t really fancy camping out and then I got very annoyed when I was told I had to pre-pay for power in slot-card lots of £5, and he couldn’t tell me how long the blasted 5 quid cards lasted for (ie. how many kWh it delivered – I only needed 1.0kWh, which is about 50p worth). Also, there was nowhere to get food without riding in to Whitby anyway, so I elected to move on, hoping for much better options in Whitby.
But when I got there I found out that Whitby was full full! I tried 4 other pubs without success before I got to the Royal, up there on the bluff in the town’s best position.
That weekend the Royal Hotel was the stop-over for a huge group of cyclists from a club in Harrogate out for their annual charity ride, a circular route that is 75 miles (120 km) each way, to and from Whitby. There were about a hundred of them with proper road racing bikes and all the gear. Fortunately, they’d already checked in well before I got there, and double-fortunately, I just got in myself ahead of two busloads of retirees out on their annual trip to the seaside. The check-in woman was very slow and very frazzled and the oldies (all younger than me, no doubt) were still checking-in 2 hours after the first ones had disembarked the bus. After waiting out the worst of the rain for an hour just looking out the window, I made a mad dash outside to take in the local bluff-side attractions in the drizzle.
I found Whitby to be fascinating and I was glad I stopped in. It has that historical connection with Australia in that Captain Cook, who is credited with being the first European to ‘discover’ the east coast of the continent, came from Whitby.
I fell in with a lovely couple from the retiree’s set and we had dinner chatting away over a bottle of plonk at adjacent tables in the corner bay window of the front bar overlooking Captain Cook.
The ruins of Whitby Abbey on the opposite headland to the Royal date back to the year 650. It was rebuilt several times after repeated sackings by the vikings in the 7th century and was finally totally destroyed by King Henry VIII in 1540 when he decided he didn’t like Catholics.
It’s where the Synod of Whitby was held in the year 664 to decide when to celebrate Easter, as within Chrisendom there were different views on that at the time, so that’s a fascinating part of it’s history too.
But the reason most people visit these days is because it is one of the settings for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Something else I found quite touching was the elderly couple braving it out and picnicking in the roaring gale and pounding rain, and then in bleak sunshine, totally oblivious to all but themselves the whole time. Good on them! They’re a hardy lot, these English.
Saturday May 7 2022. Whitby to Birtley |109 km|
It was a cold and dreary day alright but the cycling was great! One of the charity cyclists told me the NCR 1 goes all the way along the coast. Well, it took me 13 km to find it and then I promptly lost it again, though I did cross it several more times afterwards that day.
There were a couple of very steep hills coming up out of Staithes and Saltburn by sea, both interesting seaside towns with a bit of history. I do hate those anti-motorbike gates (above) though. At that one I had to lift the whole bloody bike off the ground and balance it on the handlebars across the top to manoeuvre it through.
I passed on through the meh housing estates around the south-west of Middlesborough (Ziggy’s GPS is really great at navigating through built-up areas and I can proceed with total confidence), and found a short rail trail from Wynyard Manor Woods to Wyngate. I had a meal in a pub and charged the batteries for 1½ hours but then only went another 25 km anyway because I didn’t want to get into range anxiety syndrome again and have trouble finding accommodation. My bad.
As it was I’d tried 2 hotels to no avail before finding a vacancy at the Lambton Worm Hotel halfway between the oddly-named (and vacant-hotel-less) Chester-le-Street and Birtley for £60, a real bargain compared to last night’s Royal extortion in Whitby. The food was good too – I had the local specialty of Panackelty which is slow oven-baked beef brisket with carrots and potatoes, as per the recipe in the link, and the bar and dining areas both had a nice friendly atmosphere. Ziggy had to stay outside in the front carpark chained to a table, which a was a bit of a worry, but nothing bad happened.
Sunday 8 May 2022. Birtley to Alnwick |100 km|
From the Lambton Worm hotel, I skirted the southern suburbs of Newcastle along a greenway/rail trail east back towards the North Sea coast to cross under the Tyne River via the Tyne cyclist and pedestrian tunnel (or the Jarrow Bike Tunnel as it was known locally). That was a first for me – a fancy tunnel just for bikes (two tunnels, actually, one for cyclists and one for pedestrians) accessed by a bike-enabled elevator at either end.
Then it was ploughing through the interminable housing estates that consitute the north-eastern suburbs of Newcastle, navigated unerringly by Ziggy’s GPS, until via another greenway I emerged at the coast again at a town called Seaton Sluice. Then it was along the sand dunes to the seaside haven of Blyth.
But then at Ashington my rear tyre went flat with a pinch flat (a tiny split in the tube caused by the rim when I struck a bump most likely). I couldn’t get the wheel off because the Rohloff retaining cap was ‘welded’ on by being cross-threaded, so I had to push the bike a couple of kilometers as far as the CO-OP shop in the village where a local driver going in to the store loaned me a pair of pliers to get it off. A nice cycling couple had stopped too and tried to help.
At 2.00 pm I stopped at a fancy fish-and-chip cafe on the coastal path called Drifters that the cyclist couple had mentioned to me as a bit of a cyclist’s hangout and where I might be able to get some assistance with the bike. Not bloody likely! It was full and there were lots of cyclists coming and going too, but none were remotely helpful and so I just had a meal of fish and chips and charged up the batteries for a couple of hours, full of anxiety about the condition of the bike letting me down again.
And Nope, I don’t know who that geezer is in the photo below, but he sure was keen to be in it. Never saw him before or since, as I quickly outpaced him and his mate when we emerged at the other end (we all couldn’t fit in the elevator at once). That’s my bike in front though.
I think this was just about the best day’s riding yet for me on this trip, certainly in England – the greenways, the tunnel, the seaside paths, the mostly flat terrain and a strong following wind for the last 2 hours. And it felt like that in spite of the hassle of having the rear tyre wearing out completely, and the difficulties in replacing the tube, and now a more serious defect emerging with the rear pannier rack breaking.
[By now I’d noticed an odd wobbling sensation stemming from the back and realised that the rear pannier rack had broken through the back plate. Again! That’s the third rack that’s broken. And the load was sporadically rubbing onto the wheel, not helping the worn tyre problem. I found a piece of wire to shore up the rack and soldiered on, but I needed a more permanent solution].
I made it (barely) to Alnwick (that’s not “Allen-wick” as I’d been calling it, but weirdly enough actually pronounced “Annick”).
With the complete lack of any camping opportunities still, I was lucky enough to get a room in Jo (a woman) and David’s “Castel Gate” B&B located at the entrance into Alnwick town. There are about half-a-dozen B&Bs along the main street coming into Alnwick and they all had a phone number to ring on their B&B sign. Jo and David’s place was the 4th one I tried before I found a vacancy.
I even had this view of a little courtyard outside my B&B room in Alnwick.
I wandered down the street for dinner and squandered a few pounds on a so-so pub meal and a beer a few doors down from the B&B.
– ends –
Day 27: 2022 in Europe so far: 2,931 km in 25 days of cycling
Nights in hotel 16
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)
- 2 punctures rear
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