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July 30 Sunday sunny humid 28º C Bicycle touring England We discover, as we pack up our tent and bicycle touring gear and go to leave this morning, that we've inadvertently been locked into the pasture. With all the weekend's foot traffic in the Lake District, the farmers choose to lock their pastures rather than risk someone forgetting to close a gate behind them. At the locked pasture gate we unload our bicycle touring gear and haul it over the fence, then hoist our touring bikes and pass them over the fence. On the other side we reload all of our bicycle touring equipment and cycle off, downhill. The downhill to the lake is steep and bumpy. By the time I reach the lakeshore my left wrist aches painfully, a combination of squeezing my bicycle's brake levers as hard as possible and the jarring potholes. Sharon has a wide pebbly area picked out from her explorations yesterday. We haul our fully loaded touring bicycles down a boulder-strewn path along a walking trail amidst trees. We emerge at a clearing and lean our touring bikes against an appropriately-sized and situated granite boulder. Sharon pulls out a frying pan and our Whisperlite International camp stove and makes pancakes. Several walkers passing by our little spot comment on the delicious smell. One, spying the Canadian flag on the back of my touring bicycle, asks if we have brought maple syrup. When we say no, he leaves muttering something about another myth being shattered. After a breakfast of pancakes sans maple syrup, but with generous dollops of tasty jam, Sharon jumps into the lake for a swim to cool off. She remarks how warm the water is compared to the lakes back home in Alberta and British Columbia. Once she has paddled about for a while, she comes out of the water, grabs her bike and goes off on a ride around the lake. A bridle path runs along the opposite shore and we are allowed to ride our bicycles on England's bridle paths. A while later, Sharon returns with two pint glass jars of milk and some eggs from a nearby farm. There is at least an inch of cream on top of the cold sweet milk. A group of shaved heads show up. I didn't know those kind of people appreciated nature! Man, I learn something new every day. They have an ugly pit bull with them. They jump into the lake for a dip with inner tubes strapped around their middle. Apparently they can't swim and the edge drops away abruptly and deeply. "I can't touch bottom. It feels weird," one says. They all agree the water temperature is freezing which makes Sharon laugh as she climbs out from another swim. "I see they're convincing you to go in," she says to me atop my picnic table's dry perch. Sharon says she found a phone booth just up the road a ways. I hop on my touring bicycle and go to phone home in Princeton BC to see how my parents are doing. Mom is finished her latest round of chemo treatments for breast cancer and is home from the hospital. My cousin, Danny Anderson, ties the wedding knot this weekend. My brothers, Scott and Rob, went to the wedding in Grand Forks BC. On the way back to our lakeside spot, I stopped at a farm for more milk. A stooped old woman is out in the yard, watering her roses. She looks a little wilted in this heat, just like her roses. "Can I trade you two empty ones for two full ones?" I ask, holding up our two empty milk bottles. She takes them and gives me two full ones. As I turn to put them into my panniers, she asks me when I'm going to pay for them. "As soon as I get the money off my bike," I tell her. "Oh," she says. "I thought maybe you were going to put it on the sheet." They must have some type of credit system for the locals? Kind of like putting it on a tab? I ask her if she has some sugar she can sell me for my tea. She kindly gives me half a jam jar full. When I return to our beautiful tranquil nature spot, I discover the shaved heads have left. Their past presence however is well marked -- they've left a huge pile of strewn garbage in their wake. Guess I was right about skinheads, after all. They were just refugees from the heat -- definitely not nature lovers at all. A pristine spot when they arrived two hours ago was now an eyesore littered with potato chip bags, candy wrappers, candies, gum wrappers, gum, chocolate bar wrappers, beer cans, and the shredded remains of a beach ball their ugly dog had torn apart. Shameful. |
