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June 27 Tuesday sunny 28º C Bicycle touring England I have an incredibly sore throat. My voice hurts when I try to talk. It was windy all night. It is still blowing strongly when we wake in the morning. I feel tired and have a headache. Good morning. I clamber out of our little Kelty tent and wander over to the edge of an embankment. I gaze at the white chalk outline drawing of the horse. Amazing. Incredible. I really like it. We pack up our Kelty bicycle touring tent and load up our cycling gear and zip down the hill, back into Westbury. I see a bakery and pull my touring bike off the street onto the sidewalk. An overweight woman, pulling an overloaded grocery dolly behind her, crosses the street and screeches and screeches at me, "Yer blocking the sidewalk!" "Well," I wanted to reply, "if your fat ass wasn't so wide, there wouldn't be any problem." I mumble Sorry in that polite Canadian insecure way, and make room for the big-boned Brit to pass. After she does, Sharon shakes her head, laughs, and says to me, "I thought fat people were supposed to be jolly." Sharon walks to the bakery. We console ourselves from the heavyset Brit's tongue lashing while eating plump, corpulent, overflowing strawberry jam-filled doughnuts. Ha, take that! Sharon's derailleur pulleys have worn down to spike points. I go to a cycle shop to get new sprockets. The shop doesn't have replacements. In a case of Brit ingenuity, he sells me an old derailleur for 50 pence. I take the pulleys off and exchange them with Sharon's pointy ones. After fixing Sharon's derailleur pulleys, we mount up and cycle off. Tall thick hedgerows protect us from the full brunt of the wind. Through small clearings, I catch glimpses of the white horse on the sidehill. We eat lunch at the back of a churchyard by well-kept graves. There's a shortage of park space in the English countryside. And rarely do the small towns have parks. If we are lucky, there will sometimes be a bench beside the busy road. We usually use bus shelters or churchyards for our simple bicycle touring lunchtime meals. Neither the bus shelters nor the graveyards have many people. After lunch, we cycle the Wiltshire Cycle Route until Shereton, then we cycle northwest to Bradford on Avon. Outside a small neighborhood store we get off our bicycle touring seats and sit on plastic milk crates in the shade and eat ten Revels for 99 pence. The refrigerator space in stores is much smaller than back in Canada or America. And I'm lucky when the refrigerators have cans of cold pop in them. In the freezer section I see something called Four Faggots. Only in England. A woman spots the Canadian flag on my touring bicycle and comes over and asks if those are our bikes. She says her husband was a prof at the University of Halifax and they are doing a six-month exchange in England. He teaches at Bath and, thankfully, she says, he is finished in a couple of days. She says it has been an unqualified terrible experience. They have four kids. It rained all winter. Cold and damp. The kids couldn't go outside, she says. (Guess they're made of sugar?) She complains everything in England is twice as expensive as Canada -- from food to postage. And, she says, they don't get paid any more than back home. The English kids go to school until the end of July, but her kids had their last day today, she says. Happy travels! If you expect everything to be the same as back home, just stay home. Okay? We go back into the store to buy supper. A spry old lady asks if we were at the pot party on the weekend. There was a big music festival, she says. The only pot party we have is when we're cooking up a big old batch of pasta. We cycle out into the countryside. A bumper crop of tiny flying insects fills the warm summer air. The multitudes of sheep farms in the area provide the perfect breeding grounds for flies. We see a bridle path called Cotswold Walk and push our touring bikes up a path at an open gate. We go in and set up our Kelty tent overlooking a sheep pasture toward the hills. It stays light for a long time. The stars come out. There is no moon. |
