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June 5 Monday rain morning, overcast cumulous clouds windy 16º C Bicycle touring England The stone step in front of our graveyard church entrance was wet this morning, broadcasting the fact a misty drizzle had commenced. Last night we had no visitors of any kind -- that I am aware of. I slept very well, uninterrupted until 4:40 AM, when daylight now dawns. I might even be inclined to say last night was dead quiet. Since it was still raining when we woke, we decided we may as well wait to get underway on our bicycle tour. I look out. The headstone of Edward Fish is soaked. I imagine he must be well-pleased with the weather. With the overgrown nature of the graveyard, it appears the folks buried there don't get too many visitors, so they would like to get us to stay for as long as possible. I suppose anyone who was buried here in 1700 doesn't have that many friends left around. We stuff our cycling sleeping bags and roll up the Thermarests so we can sit on them while we read and eat peanut butter and raspberry sandwiches. The raspberry jam is freshly made (the label reads May 29) with lots of sugar. The sun pokes warily out. I open our screen door and sit in the entrance arch, trying to warm up in a sun ray. Yes, singular. Inside, it is cold; outside, it is windy. A person comes with a weed whacker to trim the new graves located in the back corner. She arrived through a back gate, and doesn't notice us. We begin to pack up our cycling gear to leave. As I'm strapping my gear onto the rear of my bike, I notice the rear tire that I've been pumping up every other day due to a slow leak has gone completely flat overnight. Guess it's become a faster slow leak. Or else the ghouls were fooling with my bike tires last night. We roll our touring bikes over to the churchyard gate. Sharon offers to change my tire and tube (I must be living right). I hand her my many-patched flat-proof self-healing tube, and my new made-in-Holland tire with the fancy reflective strip encircling the blackwall. While she is installing the tube and new tire, I pump up the tube that was just removed to about the size of a tractor inner tube. Talk about a slow leak ... I still can't locate where the hole is. Sharon looks at how giant I have the tube blown up to and says that's probably not very good for it. I actually exploded a tube one time. But I had it pumped up to the size of a small hot air balloon. It meant that I didn't have to patch it. But a little hard on the ears. With my new tube and cycle tire installed, we mount up on our touring bicycles and pedal off to Carlton. We stop our England cycle tour long enough to buy groceries. I don't understand their so-called bike paths in England. Some of the cycle paths run for a block, which is fine, I suppose, if one is only going a block. But, really, it's more dangerous for us to cross two lanes of traffic and cycle a block on a bike path and then find it ends in a block and then have to recross two lanes of traffic to continue on the main road. What's up with that? I've seen some bike paths that were single lane too, and so ratty and entangled with overgrowth that a mountain bike would have had a hard time using it let alone a fully loaded touring bicycle. I sit on some grass, reading and watching our touring bikes while Sharon goes into the store. I notice that quite a few people ride their bikes to the store. More than in Canada and America that's for sure. I watch an old lady with tension bandages wrapped around her ankles come out of the grocery store and struggle to walk in oversize slippers. She wasn't cycling ... good thing ... she was barely able to make it to her car in the parking lot. Reaching it, she rested her weight against the side of the rusty car (England is the only place I've seen rusty cars in Europe) and uses the car to balance herself. Gak. She's going to drive? Well, I suppose, she is in no condition to walk. She gets the driver's door open and laboriously lowers herself into the seat. She puts on her seat belt. The jalopy starts first crank, she engages first gear and expertly drives away. Go figure. Sharon returns with a cellophane carton of five cream-filled doughnuts with an American flag on the label. Before any of the groceries are packed away, I've eaten them. All. Very good. Maybe Sharon should have bought some for herself, too. Sharon bought some taco chips. She opens the bag. Tasting one, she grimaces. "Cheese flavoured," she says. "I hate cheese flavoured." "Gee," I respond. "That's what it says on the bag." We are in a country where we can now read labels (if we were so inclined), but we're so used to not being able to read labels, we still haven't kicked the habit of not doing that. The other day I bought two sandwiches. Sharon was opening one. I asked what it was. She peers at it intently for several seconds and says it looks like beef or something. I say "Why don't you read the label?" "Oh," she replied. "I'm so used to guessing what everything is, I don't even think about reading a label anymore." I see it will take awhile. I double bag the items that won't fit into our burgeoning panniers and hang the bags over my touring bicycle's front rack. We cycle off and stop at a pharmacy in Lowestoft. Sharon goes in to check on Pyralvex for the cold sore on my lips and also to enquire about tick bites. She is told to put spirits on it to remove it. Too late. She felt an itch on her ankle when we were staying in the Dutch forest before Kroller-Muller and scratched it off. It looked like a teeny wood tick to me, but it still had its head attached which we dug out with a needle. Lately, Sharon has been complaining that her cycling shoes have begun to rub her heel raw all of a sudden, when they hadn't bothered her one bit before. Well, last night, she showed me the area around her ankle. It's a ghastly puffy purply-red affair that is perfectly nasty looking. Then she realized that was where the tick was that she had scratched off. The pharmacist didn't seem too worried about hearing about the tick bite, "as long as the head was intact." But Sharon didn't show her ankle to the pharmacist. They were out of Pyralvex too. We cycle to the beach to look at the cold, grey, windy, North Sea. Several people stop to ask us questions about our bicycle tour. We cycle to the edge of town and enter a park dedicated to men lost in the Royal Navy during the second world war. Or "The Great One" as one little old lady referred to it. Names encircle a monument with a tall column. A gold sailing vessel is perched on top. Cannons overlook the sea area. There are scads of blooming pink rhododendrons. And pigeons. I've noticed a correlation between monuments and pigeons. Sharon makes sub sandwiches -- appropriate for a Naval Park, wouldn't you say? I mix orange juice that is way too strong by itself, tasting like the medicine Mom used to give us, with a bottle of grapefruit-pineapple pop. Much better. We turn off A12 and cycle onto a country road. We cycle through a flat open area known as The Broads. But I don't see any women. We see canals lined with boats. There are some windmills, too. It reminds me more of Holland than cycle touring in England. We cycle past a guy with a wagon pulled by two horses out for an evening stroll. We cycle past a frisky colt being led by a fella who keeps one arm over its back so it doesn't jump around on the road too much. We cycle past a father and daughter out riding horses with helmets (the father and daughter, not the horses) and other horsey-related paraphernalia. We cycle onwards to some woods near Reedham's Ferry where we set up our two-person Kelty cycle touring tent. A slug is still (disgustingly) on our tent fly when we roll out our tent. "Well," Sharon observes, "it certainly was wet enough." |
