I collect my eBike from a friend’s home in Wanstead, London, and decide to go to Italy by skirting around the eastern rim of France. At map scale, it looks like an almost straight line across Kent, Flanders and the Ardennes, but when you drill down into it you’ll see there were quite a few twists and turns and even a few little missteps along the way.
Zoom-in to see incredible detail down to 5m
Saturday 13 August 2022. Wanstead to Doddington |123 km|
[Hot with a slight easterly breeze. Flat for the first 70 km, then hilly. 50% quiet B roads/ 50% cycleways, of which 50% was rough single track. In other words, totally enjoyable. Main centres passed through were Gravesend, Rochester and Sittingborne]
I really like cycling around London. The new cycleways are amazing. National Cycle Route No.3 to Dover officially begins at Greenwich and my Bosch GPS delivered me there from Wanstead perfectly, including through the under-Thames bike tunnel that emerges at the exhibit of the Cutty Sark sailing ship.
From Greenwich it’s easy enough to follow the NCR3 cycle path along the south bank of the Thames through industrial areas all the way to Erith, where you lose the river for a while and ride on single-track and rough cinder through a bushland belt as far as Gravesend, where you leave the Thames for good and strike out south-east across the neck of the Allhallows peninsula for Rochester.
At Sittingborne, where I stopped for a burger meal and a charge-up in McDonalds, I was determined to stay in campgrounds if at all possible and used google to find Palace Farm Campground not far away near the village of Doddington, and phoned ahead to make sure it was open for business and had vacancies.
The owners, Graham and Liz Cuthbert, were very friendly, and the pitch I self-selected in their family-orientated almost-empty camping area was okay-ish too, but expensive at £16. I was able to recharge the batteries in Graham’s workshop. This was the first [and only] time this year that I slept without the fly cover on, it was so hot and muggy.
At Graham’s suggestion I ate locally at Chequers Inn in the village – well, there was absolutely no other choice – where the Thai fishcakes and two beers struck the right note. I had to hurry on over to dinner because the kitchen was about to close (at 7pm on a Saturday night!), and left the unloading and setting-up of the tent until I came back after dinner, which I then had to do in the pitch dark.
Sunday 14 August 2022. Doddington, Kent, to Oye Plage, Flanders |94 km|
[Very hot and thirsty work across the delightful Kent countryside. No wonder everyone kept wanting to invade England for the past 2,000 years!].
It’s only 34 miles, 55 km, from Doddington to Dover by bike if you do it correctly, but as you can see by zooming-in, I had to do an extra 12 km when I backtracked 6 km, from Lydden to Dumbrill Hill, to go back and find one of my panniers that had been wrenched off the bike while negotiating a particularly deeply-rutted quadmire of a track across some farmer’s paddock (but still on the designated bike path, I’ll have you know). Phew! That was lucky! And I only finally noticed it missing when the unbalanced bike got the wobbles hurtling down Lydden Hill on the Canterbury Road.
I especially remember that the picture-postcard tourist town of Chilham along here was very pretty – a good place to bring a loved one for the weekend, I’d say. In its outskirts, a young couple just arrived back home from a holiday in Brittany were nice enough to fill all my water bottles with icy cold water.
In Calais, getting on the ferry and the whole check-in procedure was a cinch. With the huge Eurotunnel COVID backlog and delays I’d been reading about I expected the worst, and sure enough there were hours-long queues of vacationing Brits waiting patiently in line in the heat to get on board the ferry, but for me – no problems: as a walk-on, I was directed straight to the front of the line and was on the ferry less than half an hour after arriving in port. The passage cost £30, and £15 more for snacks and cool drinks.
I only rode for 27 km on the French side of the channel, just far enough out of Calais to be away from all the refugee camps. I headed east along a little canal and by trial-and-error found a campground called Camping du Pont d’Oye that was happy to take me in for €10.
No chance of a feed though, and I had to cycle over to Oye Plage township to find an ATM to pay for the camping spot (Pont d’Oye doesn’t take credit cards) and to buy a few snacks, mostly of the liquid variety. Overall, I would say Pont d’Oye was an unfriendly place, with low-class drunken yobs aggressively playing boules/bocce/bouche – whatever – right next to me and caterwauling until 01.00 am (when light rain finally drove them under cover). Still, the facilities were surprisingly okay – better than last night’s at Palace Farm anyway; at least I could actually use these ones.
Monday 15 August 2022. Oye Plage to Péronne-en-Mélantois |122 km|
[Overcast all day and up to 27°C; some headwind].
This is when I truly discovered that crossing Flanders by bicycle is really not my thing. One of the worst aspects of it was the many kilometers of pavé I had to traverse. A picture or two equals a thousand words, so check this out:
Pavé: it’s something the purists rave about, especially when the Tour de France includes a pavé stage (as it did this year), as a true test of strength and skill. Well, I don’t get it. It’s basically just old cobblestones that were never designed for wheels or suspension. The bike and I were being shaken to pieces and I lived in apprehension of when the next little section would appear.
The city of Lille couldn’t come soon enough for me, and perhaps I should have stayed longer there because, contrary to expectation, I found it to be a clean, prosperous and architecturally pleasing city, the bits I saw of it anyway.
But it was still only early-on in the day and I had a few more kilometeres left in me yet, so I only dallied only long enough to buy a Vodafone SIM – basically unlimited gigs for a month for €20 with full Europe coverage (but – and what they don’t tell you – it only worked while within France).
As it turned out I only went another 20 km past Lille anyway, and stopped for the night at Camping du Grand Sart run by the lovely Véronique, where a van-sized powered pitch complete with picnic table set me back only €10. A discount for being so charming, no doubt.
That’s quite a lot of gear I’m lugging around, as you can see. I had laid it all out to air and dry off a bit, and to redistribute the load more evenly among my four panniers (and to brag about how much shit I’m carrying around).
Tuesday 16 August 2022. Péronne-en-Mélantois to Hermeton-sur-Meuse|165 km|
The weather was much the same as yesterday – hot and muggy – and, well, we experienced a bit of everything this day. There was even 10 more kilometres of pavé, some B road, a canal towpath, an abandoned railway line (RAVeL, as per the sign), some single dirt track and a treacherous downhill forest path that tested my MTBing skills (and the brakes).
Virtually my whole ride this day was on the Belgium side of the border, and I passed through the large towns of Mons and Thuin. Mons is big and either awful or nice, I can’t really say: I was just happy to get there after all that pavé (although I did enjoy the canal towpath from Hollain to Nimy leading in to Mons for the last 42 km). In fact, I only made a one-word entry in my log for Mons: “ugly” – and now all the Monzanites will hate me too.
After Mons the terrain became more interesting through the Ardennes to Thuin, which is a really beautiful touristic town nestled in a narrow valley alongside the River Sambre, and where I was happy to have an enforced stop at a Turkish kebab joint for an hour to charge up. I should have stayed for longer though as it turned out.
Things became a little exciting in the final stages of the day’s ride, as some of the forest lumber trails that the GPS had put me on to were unrideable. At some intersections I had to decide which way best to go by dead reckoning, as indeed the batteries were just about dead again by then, and anything substantially uphill was out of the question. It was already getting dark and ominous there in the forest. Not knowing what still lay ahead, by dead reckoning I coasted down the last frightening descent into the Meuse River valley on an old fire trail to preserve any remaining battery, ducking under and swerving around fallen trees. It was a narrow overgrown and barely-discernable path on the edge of a drop into a gully from which I would never have been able to retrieve the bike, or myself either probably.
The campground I stayed at on the River Meuse, Castel Mosan, was a good find, and I only did find it by back-tracking down-river a kilometer or so from their hoarding, that I saw right where I popped back onto the main cycle path after my hellish downhill run. It’s in the grounds of an impressive château and Joe, the manager (and owner, I think, including of the château) was a real gem. The cost of the powered site was a bit high at €17 and there was no real food, but they made up for it with €1 beers and free bar nibbles. I did a lot of nibbling.
There were a few other touring cyclists there, the internet worked fine and the beers were cheap, so all-in-all it was a happy place to stay, and I was glad I’d made this my starting- off point for my trip up the Meuse. And the rain that fell all night long didn’t dampen my spirits at all.
– ends –
Day 35: 2022 in Europe so far: 3,753 km in 33 days of cycling
Nights in hotels 20
Night on ferry 1
Nights in tent 16
New bike defects/ repairs:
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- Rohloff oil change (Toulouse)
- Repairs to rear kickstand (Toulouse)
- 12 punctures:
- 2 punctures rear (Toulouse to Agde)
- 4 punctures front (Toulouse to Agde)
- 2 punctures rear (Hull to Birtley)
- 4 punctures rear (Alnwick to Berwick)
- 2 new tubes (Montelimar)
- Two new Ortlieb Front Roller panniers (€140 Koblenz)
- 2 sets new brake pads (£8 Boston)
- Rear pannier rack broken; temp fix with cable ties (Bamburgh)
- 2 new tubes (Scremerston)
- 1 new tyre (Scremerston)
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