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July 28 Friday 100% humidity warm Bicycle touring England It was fairly clear and sunny upon arising. Large rectangular bales lay neatly clustered in groups of six. The baler has a special contraption that is pulled behind. As the bales come out of the baler it arranges them 3x2 and drops them off. The outside swaths had been done, but most of the field lay in rows of straw. By the time we have packed up our bicycle touring gear, the sky has clouded over significantly. Only a few patches of sunlight break through occasionally. By the time we reach Dalston, England, on our bicycles, four kilometers away, the sky is entirely overcast. Outside a General store a fella recognizes our Canadian flag and tells us his daughter had just finished a six week exchange at the Penticton BC General Hospital as a doctor. Penticton is about 70 miles away from where I grew up in Princeton BC. Sometimes it's a small world. At the store, Sharon got directions to a bench down a dead end road along the river. We bicycled off to find the great spot. And it was. The only traffic were dog walkers and other bicyclists. Then it began to sprinkle, the rain spattering down. We jumped on our bicycles and headed for cover under a tree where we met Sam and his dog walker. While Sam scampered off to chase rabbits, his owner told us about various good bicycling routes in England's Lake District. He had been to Banff and Jasper Alberta and had golfed on a course near Penticton BC that he says he had to take a boat to get to. The rain let up and we bicycled on our way while Sam went off, chasing another scurrying rabbit. Once again we find the English among the friendliest people we have met so far on our bicycle tours ... especially in the UK. Or what we interpret as friendly, that is. They are more apt to stop and chat. They are interesting and good-humoured. And the fact that the speak English, sort of, we can understand them. Well, almost every word, anyway. Canada's fishing trawler incident with Spain has heightened Canada's profile on the international scene. Many people refer to the Spanish trawler incident when speaking to us. Of course, all voice their support. It's sure nice to be on the team folks are pulling for once in a while. As we bicycle south, the hilly terrain becomes hillier. We bicycle pass sheep with black heads and curly horns grazing alongside the road. The sheeps' horns sweep inward in a graceful half circle. Most of the sheep swerve away from us and our fully loaded touring bicycles when we approach. Except for one. It ran right across the road in front of me which put a large dent in my predictability factor. Also bicycled past some mean large goats looking like Big Billy Goat Gruff expecting a toll. We saw a black and white horse with one half of its face white and the other side black, the contrasting colours split right down the middle of its eyes to its mouth. Startlingly strange. It looked like two horses' heads had morphed into one. It began to rain again. We pulled our bicycles to a halt and waited in a farm lane beneath some trees while the greater part of the deluge passed. As we set off on our bicycles once again, we can see England's Lake District mountains ahead. And, as promised, we can see it raining up there in the Lake District. Sam's master told us that if there's lakes there it has to stand to reason that rain is close by to fill them up. While that may not hold true in all other parts of the world, it rings true for England. We rode a while. Before long it began to rain harder. We stopped our bicycles by another tree alongside the road. I sat on a bough, reading, until the rain saturated the leaves and began to drip on my pages. The worst passed and we set off into a soft rain. Soon we shifted onto a bicycles' granny gears and climbed a steep hill. Between sweat and soft rain we reached Cockermouth, England, thoroughly soaked and miserably wet. My old raincoat was totally drenched. It hung on me like an old wet dishcloth. Sharon asked me why I never wore my new raincoat when it's raining so hard. "Because I don't want it to get wet," was my illogical answer. We didn't make the bakery on time. Just missed it. They were gathering up the remnants of the day's non-sales as Sharon peered inside through the door's window. No one made a motion to open the door. We bicycled over to the grocery store before we suffered the same fate there, too. Sharon, leaving me with our touring bicycles, ventured inside to spend a few of our English pounds. Eventually, I glimpsed her at the checkout counter. Judging by the pile of goods she had amassed, I imagined the store must be giving the stuff away for free. Her evening grocery shopping spree came to £20 and I think it probably weighed as much. She had bought two litres of milk, two loaves of bread, fifteen eggs, a box of 48 Weetabix, a box of Muesli, a bag of potatoes, two chicken breasts, a Swiss roll, half a dozen jam doughnuts, four Snickers bars, and an assortment of sundry fruits and vegetables. Somehow we managed to get it all in, or on, our touring machines. We tottered off to the nearest gas station to fill our two large plastic water bottles. When I bugged Sharon about buyings so many groceries, she says I still have the grocery buying record from the time I spent $75 US on a bicycle touring trip across the United States in Eureka, California. There, I filled a buggy to overflowing. There was no way we could fit it all into our panniers even though we had eight empty panniers since we had set up our tent at Endert's Beach and travelled to the grocery store empty. But there was still no way we could cram it all in. We had actually had to sit in the grocery store's parking lot and eat some of my purchases before we had enough room to stuff it all into our yawning panniers. Loaded to the gills from Sharon's England grocery shopping spree, we bicycled for Loweswater Lake, a small lake about 2 1/2 kilometres in length, set high in the mountains where little English Lake District vehicles travel off of England's busy M6. The ensuing fact that our route was eventually posted with a sign reading: Not Suitable For Motors, probably helped explain why traffic ceased altogether. The one lane road we were bicycling became two small tire tracks with remnants of asphalt that became a cart track with a huge growth of green grass down the centre. Rocks and potholes filled with muddy water sprang up with. Again the value of fenders on touring bicycles became apparent as we slipped through a tricky section of soupy mud laced with liberal quantities of sheep and cow manure. An extremely steep section had me panting for oxygen. I thought I was back on a bicycle tour in Italy. But, the view at the top was incredible. At the end closest to us, the lake below shone like a blue marble set on a rolling tapestry of velvet green hills. Higher blue mountains closed the opposite end of the valley. A few well-spaced farmhouses adorned the valley below. I gazed at the encompassing beauty and realized how easily William Wordsworth received his poetic inspiration and intense response to nature from England's Lake District. "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud." Sheep graze contentedly until we pass on our touring bicycles. A couple of sheep with horns had their heads stuck through a fence (proving once again that the grass really does look greener on the other side). As we laboured past on our overloaded touring bicycles, the poor rams tried to quickly extract their heads forcibly through the wire fencing. Ouch. That's gotta hurt. A precipitous drop had me squeezing both brake levers severely. We found an open gate (practically an invitation) and pedalled through on the small rocky path into the pasture to find a wonderful free bicycle camp spot by a shale slide that overlooked the entire panorama. Gorgeous. Now what's to eat? |
