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I Saw A Picture Once It was not like summer at all. The weather was one hundred percent ugly with the high reaching eight degrees Celsius. We sheltered under our tree for two days. The rain finally leaked through the leaves and dripped on our fly with huge plops. Midday was so dark I could barely see to read my book. I could be a weather man in Britain. "Rain today. Followed by rain. Rainy periods throughout the evening." On our third day under the tree, with still no clearing in sight, we determined we could be waiting forever if we waited for the sun to shine. Listening to u.k. Radio one caller had said "I'm phoning from sunny Sussex." "Is it sunny there?" the host asked. "No," he admitted, "but I saw a picture once." "And how old are you Sir?" "I'm fifty-nine." Sharon wanted to journey forth. She had no desire to wait until she was fifty-nine. My back was getting sore from laying so long. If we didn't get moving soon, we would have Therm-a Rest mattress sores. Leaving the shelter of our tree we met a woman walking her dog. She summed the weather up as "bloody awful." It had to be bad when even the Brits were disgusted. Just down the road from her we met three German cyclists from Hamburg. They had been in England a week and were glad to be flying home that week. The women reported the Bed and Breakfasts had been comfortable, but they weren't as kindly with their weather or food assessment. We passed a tiny forest. Not stopping turned out to be a big mistake. We rode and rode but couldn't find anywhere out of sight. Along the Ouse River, we couldn't even see it due to a brick wall and dike built around it. I learned The Fens, as the area was known, had been underwater until the Dutch came over and drained it. A bridle path went into a field where folks rode their horses. Checking it out, no sooner had I gone through the gate when my mule bucked me off. I don't know what happened. One second I was sitting pretty, the next I was picking gravel out of one palm and thistles out of the other. As they called it in the old days: ass over tea kettle. |
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