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June 30 Friday sunny 32º C Bicycle touring Wales Before continuing our Wales bicycle tour, we brushed up the long grass under where our Kelty tent had been. Then, we retraced the footpath back upstream and through the two gates back to the bridge. The bridge is made from rock and has a double arch through which the dark tea-colored water flows. Extremely charming. The town of Sennybridge served up fresh buns and more milk in glass bottles from a local grocer who stood behind a counter with tinned goods behind him. You know those old-time pictures of stores in the West with the grocer behind the counter and goods lining the shelves behind him? Well, this place was exactly like that. I asked him the prices of whatever I wanted to buy. Canned peaches particularly held my fancy. After procuring supplies, we cycled off, turning left off of a flat A road onto a brutally steep one-lane unclassified road that soon had Sharon muttering, "What's wrong with A roads?" We are cycling toward the Usk Reservoir for breakfast. The road we cycle continues to climb. We are panting and sweating in the already hot humid air. We pedal along, following roads which feel like the right direction until we hit a spot named Crai. I consult our bicycle touring map. Oops. Crai, of all things, is a dead end village. What the heck? There is a church. "Do you want to eat breakfast on the church steps?" I politely enquire to a profusely sweating red-faced Sharon. "I want to eat beside water, not some stinky old church," Sharon lashes out, wiping sweat from her brow. "There may be art...," I call out to a rapidly disappearing backside. The downhill is much quicker. We pull our fully loaded touring bikes to a stop at a bridge over a small stream. We can't hear any traffic. Sharon says the Flatlanders (the name we've given the cyclists we met in Holland by the Lek River) mustn't have tried too hard. (They had been complaining there was nowhere in Europe they could bicycle tour and not hear traffic.) We sat on the bridge wall for half an hour. No one went by. Maybe Wales isn't so bad for bicycle touring, after all. We pack up our leftover cycling food and continue biking toward Usk. This time I watch the map in my handlebar bag's clear map holder very closely. At a Y junction, Sharon asks if we go right. I say my map shows the left goes a ways farther and then turns right. We go left. The one-lane road we had been cycling narrows slightly. It goes past a farmhouse, complete with barking dog. We come to a gate. We open the gate and cycle through. The paved road goes through a pasture. A few cows look up, mildly amused as we pedal past on our touring machines, before going back to chewing more grass. We come to the end of the pasture and open another gate. The pavement continues on the other side. I pray that this road is not going to dead end in another farmer's yard. Before cycling too much farther off the map, I recheck the map. "Yep, we must be right here," I say, pointing to a stream on my map. We cycle across the stream. We come to another gate beside a farmhouse. The road turns to dust and rock. It is not looking too good for me or my map-reading skills. Sharon says, "I'll wait here while you check to see if the road continues." I cycle off on the rocky road. I cycle past the farmhouse, I go through another gate, and then I cycle up a hill. The road goes around a corner out of sight. Happy that the road appears not to end at the farmer's house at least, I cycle back and tell Sharon the road continues. We cycle off, going through two more gates. The "road" up the hill becomes a jumble of rocks. It is incredibly steep. We dismount our fully loaded touring bicycles to grunt and push. About three-quarters of the way up, Sharon leans her bike against the road bank. I do likewise. We walk to the top. We are greeted by another gate. A bunch of sheep and cows occupy the pasture beyond. The road we are supposed to cycle has ruts higher than our front panniers. Lowrider front panniers aren't the best choice for this off-road bicycle touring stuff. So, my prayers had been answered. The road didn't end in a farmer's yard. It's worse. Far worse. We would have been lucky if the road had ended at the farmer's barn. But then, where would your sense of adventure be? We decide to cycle back as it doesn't appear it will get better for a ways. I sit down beside my fully loaded touring bicycle and fish a banana from a bicycle pannier. While eating the banana, I reflect on the miserable injustice of it all -- even when we know where we are on the map, we still manage to be lost. I gather my strength, hoping that it will be enough to hold my crazily heavy touring bike back on the downhill. Sharon says we should stick to cycling on the primary strata from now on. "My itinerary is only a statement of intent, not a promise," I tell her. She is not impressed. We cycle back through the many gates, opening and dutifully closing each one behind us, past the same cows we had passed an hour prior, who look up with as smug a look as a cow's face can possibly have, and give us a low moo, as if to say, "When I first saw you, I knew you were lost." We cycle out a gate at the bottom and then turn left past the first farmhouse, complete with barking dog. Ah, shaddup. We ride past a sign stating "Usk Reservoir 3 1/2." It's actually pointing in the direction we are travelling! So, just maybe, the Usk Reservoir is not totally a figment of my imagination after all. I was beginning to have serious doubts this reservoir even existed. At a downhill, that crosses a cattle guard and a creek, I see a parking area and a picnic table. We pull our fully loaded touring bicycles in there. A tiny car in the parking lot has just disgorged its four occupants. All four car doors and the trunk are flung open. It appears as though the vehicle had a sudden fit of car sickness and puked its innards out onto the gravel of the parking lot. There is a middle-aged couple with two elderly women in the parking lot. "We saw you yesterday by the Craddoc Golf course!" they declare. "Yes, that was us," we confirm. "We were lost there, too." When they learn we are cycling around the
world, the smallest and most withered of the two old ladies smiles.
She holds up her cane and shakes it in the air. "Do it now!"
she says. Good advice at any age. "Oh," the man answers, "just back up the road you came down, a quarter of a mile to the left. You just missed it." We thank them, turn our overloaded touring bicycles around and cycle back up. Sure enough, we come to the reservoir. Proving once again the old adage: Usk and you shall receive. We find a quiet spot at the end of the land and have a belated brunch under the shade of a small tree. Well deserved, I say. At 5 o'clock, we manage to persuade ourselves to continue our Welsh bicycle tour. Mainly due to the fact that we have no food for supper. There are lots of trees around the reservoir that look like they'd make good free camping. We pull our touring bicycles into a house
advertising "Free Range Eggs." We buy six eggs, just
in case all of the stores are closed by the time we find them.
Oh, by the way, the free range eggs sign was rather misleading.
The eggs weren't free -- they cost me sixty pence. We decide we don't need a store after all. We can make egg sandwiches. We go to a country park and eat at a picnic table while watching doves and peacocks. After supper, we cycle some more. As the reddish-orange sun vanishes behind a bank of hazy clouds, we pull our touring bicycles off the road and into a thick woods. We're partway out of the county park. Why do they plant these trees so close together when they reforest? Don't they realize they're going to grow? The forests in Wales are nearly impenetrable. Sharon finds a clearing under a huge old oak tree which has been preserved from the woodcutter's axe. A wall of small evergreens enclose it on all sides. We set our Kelty tent up beneath the old oak's spreading boughs and wish a light breeze could penetrate those densely packed conifers. You can live life scared. Or you can live life. |
