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Cotswold It was windy all night and still blowing strongly in the morning. I felt tired and had a headache. I had a throat so sore that when I spoke, my voice hurt. What a great way to start the day. We zipped down the hill into Westbury. I saw a bakery and pulled onto the sidewalk. A grossly overweight woman pulling a grocery dolly screeched: "Yer blocking the sidewalk!" "Well," I thought, "if your fat ass wasn't so damn wide there wouldn't be any problem." "I thought fat people were supposed to be jolly," Sharon said. We consoled ourselves by eating overflowing strawberry filled doughnuts. Sharon's derailleur pulleys had worn down to spiky points. A cycle shop didn't have replacement pulleys, but he sold me an old derailleur for a dollar and I took the pulleys off myself. Thick hedgerows protected us from the full brunt of the wind. Through small clearings I caught glimpses of the horse on the sidehill. We ate lunch at the back of a churchyard near well-kept graves. There was a shortage of park space in England. Rarely did small towns have them. If we were lucky we would find a bench beside the busy road. We usually used bus shelters or churchyards for our lunch time meals. Neither the bus shelters nor the graveyards had many people. We followed the Wiltshire Cycle route until Sheraton, then we headed northwest to Bradford on Avon. There wasn't a cloud in the sky and the mercury climbed to the high twenties. Outside a small neighbourhood store we sat on plastic milk crates in the shade and ate Revels. The freezer space in stores was much smaller than back home. I considered myself fortunate when they had cans of cold pop. In the freezer section I saw something called Four Faggots. Only in England. A spry old woman asked if we were at the pot party on the weekend. There had been a big music festival in town. Another woman asked "Are those your bikes?" Her husband was a prof at the University of Halifax and they had taken a six month exchange. He was teaching at Bath and was finished in a couple of days. She maintained "It has been an unqualified terrible experience." They had four kids and it had rained all winter. Cold and damp. The kids couldn't go outside. She complained everything from food to postage was twice as expensive as Canada, and they didn't get paid any more than back home. Sharon and I escaped into the countryside's quietude. A bumper crop of tiny insects filled the warm summer air. The sheep farms provided the perfect breeding grounds for flies. A bridle path named Cotswold Walk went up a path through an open gate. Sheep bounded up to check us out as we set up our tent overlooking their pasture. |
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