|
June 26 Monday morning totally overcast afternoon not a cloud in the sky sunny hot 30º C Bicycle touring England The B road we're cycling is fairly busy and not too scenic. Yes, we're still bicycle touring on the wide open Salisbury Plain. We bicycle an unclassified road to Stockton. The scenery improves immediately and immensely. Our cycle touring scenery has gone from flat white chalk fields to a lovely hilly forest. It is a good ride through the trees. We pull our touring bikes to a halt and eat breakfast in a bus shelter - that has a thatched roof! We're in a tiny village. Across the road is a large iron gate with two coats of arms and a paved drive leading to a mansion. Just down from us are squealing and very stinky pigs which we get a whiff of whenever the wind changes directions. We saddle up and pedal on and notice a blue bike sign for the Wiltshire cycle way - we saw some Wiltshire cycleway signs on posts as we intersected or bypassed the cycle path on the road we were cycling, but we didn't know where the Wiltshire Cycle Way went, so we didn't chance following it. This section of the Wiltshire cycle way is going our way, so at a Y intersection, we decide to follow the Wiltshire cycle path. We cycle down a remarkably pretty lane that in't on our map. We cut off the Wiltshire cycle route at Warminster so we can go into town and send some mail home, including our bicycle touring journals. Sharon wants to send her old Gore-Tex rain jacket home. I have a roll of slide film with some good bicycle touring photos. We box it up and get lucky. Our bicycle touring memorabilia weighs 1900 grams - the limit is 2000 grams, so we just made it! Much better than weighing in at 2100 grams. I ask the postal clerk to send it the cheapest way. She looks it up and says it will cost £14.90. Gak! "I don't have that much," I say. "Well," she says, "it could go surface for £6.40. But I don't know when it will get there." I take the surface route, and hope that it's shorter than the bicycle touring post we mailed from Sardinia Sardegna, which took three months. But hey, as long as it makes it back to Canada, I'll be happy. Warminster has a pedestrian shopping area. We lean our fully loaded touring bicycles against an enclosure that goes around a leafy tree. A bench in a half arc faces the tree. We sit on the bench, eating a package of ten ice cream bars -- they are like Revels without the stick. Bicycle tourists can eat an insane amount of ice cream. A guy comes by and talks to us just to hear himself, I think. He tells us he is the best this and the best that. He says he is Canadian, but he has a massive English accent and is wearing a Stars and Stripes flying jacket. He shows us his postcard collection which he carries in his backpack. I am trying to write postcards ... this annoys him because I'm not devoting my full attention to his rambling banter. He asks me questions to get my attention back. Eventually, someone comes along and collects him. A punker with the best punk hair I have ever seen comes along. His hair looks like colourful feathers the way he has it painted. The center row of hair is the tallest -- black with red stripes. A row on each side is shorter and is black and yellow. He has two rings, one in each nostril. A heavy chain with a brass padlock is around his neck. His earrings are a safety pin in each ear. Ouch! He's wearing a German army shirt over a Metallica T-shirt. Bullet cartridges line his waist. Blue jeans and army boots finish off his costume. I ask him if I can take his picture with my bike. After careful consideration he says, "No, not with the bike." I should have asked him if I could take it without the bike. Next time I'll just use my telephoto. Sharon says she can't believe he said no. Anyone with attention-getting hair like that is just begging to have their picture taken. The tourist info gives us a map for the Wiltshire Cycle route. It goes north from Warminster, so we decide to follow it. Just as we're mounting our fully loaded touring bicycles, ready to leave, a lone touring cyclist from northern Wales pulls up. He wants to know if we want to ride to Bath with him. He says he's cycling on the A roads. We tell him we're cycling on the back lanes. He says he doesn't like to cycle the back lanes because they jog all over the place and take too long to get anywhere. We tell him we like to cycle the back lanes because they jog all over the place and we don't care how long it takes to get somewhere. Ah, the essence of bicycle touring. To each his own.
The Wiltshire Cycling route is excellent. It goes along little paths that we never would have found. Some are back lane bicycle paths that cars are not allowed on. The scenery is great. We swoosh down a long hill on our fully loaded touring bicycles and come into Longleat with its 145-room mansion and safari park. We pull our touring bikes to a stop and eat at a picnic table set beneath huge trees on a well-tended lawn. It's hot. Our water is hot. I go into the cafeteria to get ice. A comely waitress leads me to the bar. She opens a small ice bucket -- about the same size as the one I have at home for chilling wine. By the time she fills my water bottle, half the bucket is empty. I notice they don't have ice machines everywhere in England like they have in America. England doesn't have bags of ice either. It must cost too much to make ice with the price of electricity. I pour a bottle of warm Coke over the ice and enjoy chilled Coke for a change. Warm Coke is just not that great. A table of high-schoolers call out, "Rode all the way from Canada!?" "Yep!" I shout back. "That Mariana Trench is a bitch to ride up." It is hot cycling in the sun. It is cold in the shade when we are not cycling. As we look at the mansion before leaving. a couple of mountain bikers come over to talk with us. One is pushing his bike -- he has a flat. They ask if we have a bicycle tire (or is that tyre?) patch kit. We patch a snake bite puncture for him and pump up his tire. At 35 pounds pressure, he says he's never had it that hard before. "That's probably why you had a snake bite puncture," we tell him. Our good deed done for the day, we cycle away, climbing up and up. We get a good view of the green valley below. We cycle through a park forest. Somehow we've lost the Wiltshire Cycle Trail. We keep on pedalling, and before too long, we catch up with the Wiltshire Cycle Trail again -- but we had to go on a busy A road to do so. As we're cycling along through the English countryside, we glimpse the White Horse of Westbury in the distance. In Westbury we follow signs and are soon climbing steeply to the horse on our fully loaded touring bicycles. I pull off the road in a field and walk a ways over mounds and hillocks in tall grass. The wind is gusting mightily. I want to take a photo of the White Horse, so I lay down and try to hold the camera steady. Buttercups on long stems wave in the foreground. People are just dots on a ridge above the figure of the White Horse. We push our bikes across the sidehill to a clump of trees to a spot that overlooks the valley. The white horse is to our right. As we lay in the grass, we see two people slide down the horse. No wonder Stonehenge is fenced off. People sure can be stupid. No doubt they would be climbing on top of Stonehenge to get their picture taken. Bolt holes and rock climbing ropes would dangle off Stonehenge. As darkness sets in, lights glimmer in the valley below. Everywhere. Village lights prick through a black velvet tapestry which is the English countryside. I hadn't realized how populated the English countryside is while riding through it on our touring bikes. The hedgerows are deceptive -- they hide the houses. Up above, snug in our Kelty two-person bicycle touring tent, I can see closely spaced villages. The areas between villages are lined with houses in between. The only non-lit spaces are some tiny farmers' fields. When we first arrived in England on our bicycle tour, John told us: "America is spaces with towns. England is towns with spaces." I see what he means. |
