August 16 -- Day 49
Surprise! We're still here.
Saturday, Duncan picked up Nancy and the Moge at the airport and surprised them with breakfast at Colin's. We surprised her with our presence.
We shared (what we supposed would be (though we'd all become accustomed to the unexpected)) a final breakfast à la français together and wished everyone goodbye again.
Fun and unusual boardgames learned about in Oxford and P. Risboro
Let us pause for a small parenthesis here. The Oxford and P. Risboro gang have enlightened my heretofore paltry knowledge of boardgames with such classics as:
- The London Game (navigate the Underground of London as efficiently as possible, dodging randomly closed stations and switching lines as rarely as possible. Make sure you visit Mornington Crescent to pay homage to everyone's favorite zaney radio quiz show, I'm Sorry I haven't a Clue.)
- The Cooking Game (kind of like "Go Fish" meets "Clue" -- turn in dizzing spins about the house, picking up ingredients at the garden, front door, and the pantry, and dialing up your neighbor to request (read: steal!) ingredients from your him or her. Goal: to create legitimate recipes, but left with random foods, to create something convincingly edible)
- Colditz (collect equipment and plot your nationality's escape from this infamous Nazi prison -- will you dig a tunnel? Do you have clippers to get through the barbed wire? Watch out for the guard! Historically accurate -- based on real escape-attempts!)
Thank you for showing me that there is more to this form of entertainment than the makers of Monopoly and Parcheesi had convinced me.
On the road again...
We made it farther than we had on our previous attempts to leave P. Risboro, but boy, were we in for a hard day of biking. Colin had warned us about the hills we were biking through, but our bodies, spoiled by two weeks of cream teas and delicious shepherd's pies, just weren't sure if they could handle the pain. A few times, our bicycles became pushbikes again as we struggled up hills, armed with rudimentary maps (courtesy of Google, the Sustrans website, and Colin's printer) that didn't show elevation. Nonetheless, it felt great to be back on the road, and I lost myself in my thoughts in the rhythm of the cycle.
The Comedy of Errors, continued.
We weren't free of our troubles, either.
Struggling up some steep hill too busy with traffic with little shoulder, my chain flung off as I over-shifted the gears. Frustrated and hot, I slipped it back, got back on, and kept going up the hill.
After a few hundred more slow feet with less-than courteous drivers passing (would it be so difficult to move over??) -- Thunk! -- I went forward, but Hygina didn't. Cue primal scream.
My bags, strained by nearly two months of bearing the weight of all my stuff, had buckled and bent in towards my back wheel. The last thing I wanted was for my spokes to go the way of Joe's, so a few modifications of the bags' internal structures (i.e. flipping over the stiff inner panel that provides each bag with rigidity) cleared up that trouble.
So why did my rear wheel keep giving me trouble? A quick diagnostic showed that the fender had bent close to the tire, grating down on it. Okay, so I bent it back.
A few miles later, same problem. I bent it back some more.
Apparently, this wasn't good enough for my tire, who decided to take things into her own hands.
A few miles later, while biking up a hill -- CRUNCH!
I hopped off and looked back -- the back three inches of the fender had been eaten off by the tire. Goes to show that sometimes problems do solve themselves.
"Uh, I think we're heading back to Great Missendon."
Despite the difficulty, the biking was pleasant, the hills were beautiful and kept the cycling interesting. We stuck to the trusty Sustrans trail as much as possible, as it proved to take us through great scenery (lovely farms and towns) and on more-or-less safe roads. However, even with our map, we managed to get lost when the signage got a bit vague. Joe noticed first when we started heading back towards a town from which we'd just come an hour before. We ended up going three miles in the wrong direction, which became six miles (ten kilometers!) covered for no real reason, which is a lot when you're worn out and trying to make time.
Ah, well, we rested in a small town next to a duck pond and pondered the species staring at us expectantly as we munched oats and chocolate. Ah, the trusty old diet.
The Magic Roundabout
We had fond memories as we passed through Hemel Hempstead (yes, that really is the name of a city), where we had been only days before while wheel-hunting. Somehow, we navigated the magic roundabout. This is the real name of this oddity of traffic design meant to confound and scare the blazes out of any who dare to enter its orbit. People here refer to it in normal sentences, Harry Potter-style: "So, turn left, and at the magic roundabout, take your first exit..." "Wait, what?" one might reply to such a statement with a snigger, which is met in turn with a sober look that seems to say, "What? Don't tell me you haven't heard of one."
On the video game version of this trip, you earn fifty thousand points for successfully navigating the magic roundabout.
The magic round-a-bout is like any other roundabout, except that it's a crazy wheel of confusion and death. It has two rings of traffic (one nestled snuggly inside the other) that spin traffic in opposite directions about its axel! The roads leading to and from this two-dimensional gyroscope are two-directional themselves, so, once you manage to get into the thing, you have traffic coming at you from around a curve and from the sides. The only magic part about it is that you make it out on the other side, alive and going in the proper direction. This monstrosity of urban design must be the offspring of some Frankenstein of urban design, who hoped to create a more efficient system and ended up screwing it all up. Imagine the insanity with me for a moment.
Okay, it wasn't too bad.
That takes the cake
Once out of the On the way up what promised to be our last gigantic hill, I saw Joe stop ahead of me on the bike path. I burst into laughter as he explained, "I was just biking up the hill and I heard a clicking sound. All of the sudden, I had no seat." Sure enough, his bike seat had fallen off, as "The bolt just sheared off!"
I waited at the top of the hill with our bike bags in a little park under a big tree while Joe sped off to find a bike shop before the clock tolled 7 pm. I plotted possibilities for us, should he return empty-handed (take a bus or train to meet our ferry in Harwich? Call Colin -- again? Camp here and wait until a store opens on Monday?), but he showed up about an hour later, happily endowed with a saddle. Apparently, he nearly didn't get it.
"I went to the first shop, and they didn't have any saddles. So I went to the second bike shop and made it just before closing. I was standing in line when I realized that I had left my wallet at in my bike bag! I explained the situation to the cashier, and she hemmed and hawwed, then went to the backroom to ask what to do. Who comes out but the guy we talked to the other day about my wheel! He said, 'Oh, it's you! Just take it.'" Wow, here's a holla out to the generosity of Steph at the bike shop in Hemp Hemelsted.
We biked a few more hours that evening until we got to Hatfield, camping in a little patch of woods near a blackberry patch. Like black bears, we gorged ourselves on dessert from Mother Nature and lay down for the night.
August 17 -- Day 50
Up and at 'em, we were simply trying to cut the distance between us and our ferry. The hills the day before (plus our getting lost) had kept us from getting too far the day before, and still had nearly ninety miles to go before our ferry left on Monday. Right, we couldn't think so wishfully. Joe texted Nancy back in Oxford to see if she could change our ferry to Tuesday.
In the meantime, we had a bit of a day. In our hurry, we got on busier roads and rode on a widish shoulder, but broken glass soon got the better of my innertube. While changing the tube on the side of the road, we realized that we had only one patch left between the two of us, and at the rate we were popping flats, that wouldn't last long. Sure enough, five minutes down the road, I hit some more glass and -- sssssssss.
At the next town, we stopped in vain at a sporting goods shop (balls and sneakers? that's fo-shizzle for people who play games!).
Saved by the Irish, yet again
We found our way back to our favorite Sustrans route with the help of a woman and her exhuberant dog, and, trusting the signs and our inner compasses, got off those bleedin' highways and onto backroads again. Not too far out of town, we were cruising on a lovely one-lane road, when we came to a junction -- which way to go? We were heading west, but the sign was vaguely pointing to the east. We were consulting our map when along came a fellow biker. A small man of about 65 or 70, his muscles rippled under his spandex. He opened his mouth, and what would come out but the most detailed directions in the loveliest Irish accent you'd ever heard. "Tell ya what," he said, "I'll go that way m'self a bit and show ye the way." And so the three of us cycled slowly off (towards the west, in the end). He asked us about where we'd been and what we'd done, and then went on to tell us how he'd come here in 1960 and had simply never left. Retired now, he cycles two or three days a week with a local club, and they always end the day's trip at a pub in town. "Man, that's the way to retire," said Joe to me, as we left the kind man at a crossroads.
Around about seven pm, we were tired and feeling the pangs of tea withdrawal. We stopped at the warm and cheerful Duke of Wellington pub (catching a few looks for our sweaty and dirty atire) for a tea or a squash (cordial with water, refreshing!), then found the nearest spot of woods to crash in for the night...near a dog kennel and some blackberry bushes. I felt a swift breeze that promised rain.
A notable street we passed
"The Street"
August 18 -- Day 51
Sure enough, the sky delivered us precipitation in the morning. Joe, unable to get comfortable, woke up in a puddle. We got out of there as quickly as we could and decided just to bike on in the rain -- we had just about forty miles to cover -- piece of cake!
Joe had another flat in his rear tire as we left Peverly Hatfield. We pulled off an old patch from another innertube that was busy taking up space in my bag to patch it. 12 miles to Colchester.
It went flat again.
And again.
We stopped at a roundabout, where Joe decided to swap the innertubes on his tires. While doing this, he realized that the flat innertube actually had two holes, one right next to the other, as though a nail, in its zealousness, had punctured it twice. He glued the patch over the two holes, and we held our breath the remaining four miles to Colchester.
Ah, Colchester, "The Oldest Recorded English Town," where we stopped to buy more innertubes and patches (whew!), to check the internet, and to eat lunch in the park near a very imposing castle. Again the strange looks.
The Hobo Look
Okay, perhaps we'd come to deserve it. Or I had, at least. Strapped over my bike bags with bungee cords were various pieces of laundry that needed to dry, and my tin bowl was hooked and drying over top of that (what? I'd rather not pack it wet into my bags!). Plus, my hands were a bit dirty from changing innertubes.
It rather made it all the more fun.
Again with the Tourism Office
It took about four people and a manager to figure out where the bike train continued from here, but we found it again as we left town. "They probably don't get that question much," Joe figured. It would appear that way.
The trail followed the river for a while, and we were blissful. It was stress-free biking for miles -- no cars at all, just quiet trail. In the darling little town of Wivenhoe, it started to rain, but we pushed on, eager to get to Harwich. We lost the signposts for the bike trail and got back onto backroads.
WivenhoeAbout nightfall we finally saw the sea, and we pushed on til Harwich. We found the bike trail here again, more detailed this time with distances noted, but it pointed in the wrong direction. It was dark, but we were determined to find the port from which we would disembark before going to sleep, as we didn't want to be hunting for it in the early morning. Turns out it was about a mile or two in the opposite direction from which the sign pointed. How devious!
August 19 -- Day 52
We caught the ferry early in the morning. This time, we were sailing with the Stena Line Company on a very blandly-named ship, the Britannica. Oh, yawn. They got nothin' on Irish Ferries. No theme, no literary or cultural tradition. That being said, it got us across the North Sea, we found handicapped bathrooms to wash ourselves in, and, though, I was slightly green at the gills, there were no tossed cookies.
Something must be said, however about the miniscule size of their teacups! This was the last opportunity we had to drink a proper cup of English tea, but we refused to imbibe out of principle, the PAPER cups being about the size of a thimble. Really.
We watched the field and track portion of the Olympics, and were pleasantly surprised to see three Americans take home all three medals for one of the events.
The Netherlands! A bikers heaven!
Ah, Holland, land that the Puritans fled from to go to Massachusetts! Why would anyone leave thee? Country of windmills, perfectly-spoken foreign languages, legalized pot, and bicyles! Really, if marijuana weren't already their state flower, the bicycle would be. Were it a plant. You get what I mean.
On top of it, the people are lovely! You'd think the Dutch would jealously guard this strange Utopia, but no, they smile and kindly help you along, even volunteering help when you simply look lost, and in English from the get-go.
Leaving the (very clean) port, we biked straight onto the smoothest, loveliest path we'd yet seen. The signage was clear and marked the distances, and we set off up the coast towards Amsterdam. We zinged through sand dunes and past flower-filled greenhouses and *ding! ding!* were passed by the most beautiful cycles we'd yet seen. Everyone was on a cycle here, and you would be too, were your towns and cities connected by a vast, accessible, well-maintained system of cycling highways. Yes, dear friends, CYCLING HIGHWAYS. No cars in sight. Just cycles and the occasional roller blader (they look so silly!). At one point, we heard an approaching car behind me, when vroom! My mistake! Five cyclists passed me at top speed. Wooooow.
We passed through the Hague and got a bit off-track, but sooner or later got back on the trail and into a national park. Here, horse trails and footpaths snaked around as well, and it was only after a little while that we realized that "Fietspad" meant "bike path."
The Dutch language, we found, is kind of like English spoken in some really thick East Anglia accent, to the point that they just started inventing other words. Really. We managed to deciper quite a bit from signs, food labels, and other literature, but it would have been difficult without a given context. At the entrance to the park, we saw a sign that said something like "Ticksen" and "Lyme." That was easy enough to figure out. (At some points, we were very amused by the way the Dutch seemed to absorb other languages: we saw one sign that seemed to use German, English, Dutch, and French in just four words, "Verboden Parkerin aan Trottoir" (Forbidden Parking on Sidewalk). How very different from the protectionist Académie Française, which (angrily! furiously!) struggles to protect French from the influx of English vocabulary.)
Camping on a grassy knoll in a pine forest, we kept our eyes peeled for the creepy crawlers as we listened to the wind in the tree-tops.
August 20 -- Day 53
Is that a mole?
Joe had four ticks actually feeding on him the next day, and I brushed two off of myself. Coming from the rural southeast, these guys were nothing new to me, and I showed Joe how to pull them off gently with the pair of tweezers I'd packed. These guys were particularly dangerous, because, as I later found, they didn't itch even after being attached to you for hours. This meant careful searches and conversations that began with, "Wait, is that a freckle?" and "Can you check this spot for me?"
Crash! into me, hey-hey...
With the fierce ocean's wind at our backs, we continued up the dunes all morning, then turned right at some small town, and headed straight into Amsterdam.
We got in right at evening rush hour. We weren't even in the center for five minutes, when I caused a pile-up. Unused to heavy bike traffic, I didn't realize that five people were tailgating me. Up ahead, Joe shouted back to me that he had a flat. I whipped my bike off the path and onto the sidewalk to stop, and the next thing I knew, I turned back to see some woman, shouting at me in Dutch, and a confused tangle of bicycles and people. Shaken, I said, "I'm sorry?" "You didn't signal, you just stopped!" she said. "It's her fault!" she declared to the others. On hindsight, she shouldn't have been so close to me, but everyone was okay, and Joe and I helped some girl (who'd been cycling in a mini-skirt and high-heeled boots while chatting on her cell phone!) straighten her handlebars. "It's okay," she said, "Thanks! Bye!" Joe gave me a much-needed hug.
Why, yes, we do have a tire pump
We found a lively campground that Joe and Colin had both stayed in before (at separate occasions) loaded with young internationals. After showers (a luxurious seven minutes!), we were planning our brief stay over dinner (curry saurkraut...one of the more interesting grocery-store finds), when a young man came up to us: "Scuzi! Have you got a tire pump?" He smiled incredulously when I ran off to fetch it out of my bag, saying, "You are the first people I've asked! Wow!" He went on to introduce himself as Stefan, and he explained that he and his girlfriend Jana were from Bavaria and were biking around the city as well. The four of us chatted for nearly an hour before we went our separate ways, Joe and I off to the town center.
August 21 -- Day 54
City of Bikes
Everyone rides a bicycle here, and Amsterdam boasts that fact. Signs brag about how the city is "pedaling its way to being green" (despite the fact that they have NO RECYCLING PROGRAM), and associate intelligence with cycling. I saw a businessman in a suit lined with red silk cycling near the central train station; girls in small skirts and heels; mothers and fathers with two kids on the back and room for cargo in the front (beats a minivan any day). All these cyclers, however, meant that we had to change our focus as we navigated the streets: once we only looked out for cars; now we had our eyes and ears peeled for bikers, pedestrians, cars, trams, and buses.
Joe's new wheel, despite its newness, had been squeaking since we left Colin's place, and so I parked Hygina while he got his Peugeot fixed. The woman clucked her tongue and told him to come back in half an hour. Apparently, the spokes (those devilish things!) were loose again. We strolled around the city, watched some hiphop artists spin on their heads in a square, found the Aushwitz memorial, and picnicked on melon.
The houses here are very much worth a paragraph. Back in the day, property owners were taxed on how much square-footage their house took up. To maximize the usable space, Amsterdamers minimized the size of their staircases, making them super-steep to the point that one practically crawls on one's hands and feet as one is climbing up. In order to get furniture to the upper floors, they hoist their couches and settees in through the window via a rope and pulley system. One problem: how to keep the family four-poster from slamming through the lower glass panes on its way up to the third floor? Solution: build the house at an angle. Perhaps it's the entire building or just the front façade that's leaning, but many houses here are therefore crooked.
(They also have huge glass windows without curtains or shutters, so you can see right into people's offices, living rooms, and kitchens -- all very neatly kept).
Other very cool form of housing here: houseboats on the canal! Don't like your neighbours? Don't like your city? Pick up and go!
We left the city around 5 pm and headed into the country. It took us a while to escape the city sprawl, and once we were in the country, we picked up our bike highway again and found ourselves amongst farms, farms, and more farms. We sprang upon our first good plot of woods (which was quite narrow, really, and had more than its fair share of mosquitos), and settled down for the night to the screams of mice by our heads.
To be continued...
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1 comment:
Yeah! The rest of the story! Sorry. I was momentarily possessed by Paul Harvey.
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