Cycle touring – Page 4 – Avoiding Potholes

A Tale of Three Ferries (and two punctures)

This was the moment Clare had been dreaming of – coffee and croissants in Saint-Malo as a reward for completing Stage 1, Bath to Portsmouth – and I’m very relieved to say that it didn’t disappoint.

He who would travel happily must travel light.
Antonine de St Exupery

We had an inauspicious start on Wednesday (Day 2) with our first puncture. Not from a sharp stone or nail as we raced along the byways but from some over vigorous pumping in the hotel car park. No matter. As it was on the tricky back wheel of Clare’s bike, it gave Andy a chance to impress her with his manly bike maintenance skills. Takes ten seconds on the Tour de France. An hour and a half later we were ready to go.

Unfortunately he then destroyed all the brownie points he’d built up by getting us lost before we left Salisbury. Apparently dotted lines on the ViewRanger map do not mean cycling short cuts but indicate narrow footpaths only suitable for walkers and small dogs. In this case it disappeared into nothingness and left us well and truly on the wrong side of the river.

As you can see from our Strava trail we ended up back in Salisbury an hour later, which meant another missed coffee stop. NOT good.

Once we did get going, we bowled along through the Wiltshire countryside and into Hampshire at record speed (about 22kph). This meant we got to our good friend Mandy’s house on time and enjoyed a lovely evening with her, Ian and Nicola who had recently cycled up Mont Ventoux (BIG respect!!).

Thursday (Day 3) was relatively easy although we did get caught in our first sharp downpour and discovered that things do not work as well on bikes when they’re wet – bells lose their ding, people (the same) but most importantly brakes.

The coastal route involved three ferries. First (and best) was the pink Hamble-Warsash ferry, a route that has been operated for 364 days a year for over 800 years. The Bishop of Winchester originally owned it just to transport his horse up the coast. Now it’s for walkers and cyclists, with Boxing Day one of the most popular days of the year. Then we took the very efficient Gosport-Portsmouth commuter ferry and finally our P&O Portsmouth to Saint-Malo night crossing.

Unfortunately Clare’s bike developed a slow puncture on the way. Having already proved his manhood (or perhaps not, as it was the same wheel), Andy thought it best to let the bikeshop boys handle it this time. Ok, so it only took them 20 minutes but did they properly check the brake alignment? Here’s some pictures of the two contrasting experiences:

Thanks for all your helpful comments about the weight distribution. We’ve reduced and redistributed so Andy now has 16kg and Clare 12kg. It feels about right though we haven’t tested it on a really big hill yet. Here’s what we took out:

Joint

2 bungees
2 knives & 2 forks
1 Tupperware box

Andy

1 cycling shirt
1 pair of shorts
1 pair socks
2nd pair of sunglasses, no Raybans 😦

Clare

1 cycling shirt
2 t-shirts
1 vest
2 pairs socks
2nd electrical adaptor
1 toothbrush holder
1 travel handbag
The nozzle to the hairdryer
A paper roadmap of France (yes, really!)

We’re pleased to report that both designated luxury items, Clare’s hairdryer and Andy’s pillow, have survived the cull.

Clare and Andy

As we cycled out one Autumnal morning

All the advice told us to take it easy the first day. So we decided to cycle 76km (47m) with 800m of hill climbing, riding with heavy panniers for the first time!

A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step (pedal turn).
Lao Tzu

We were late leaving of course. The planned time was 10am, allowing for a relaxed coffee stop in Frome. The actual time was 12.30, which meant a quick sandwich stop instead. Packing, clearing up, faffing, locking up, checking, faffing, hovering, arguing, rechecking. It will be a familiar pre-holiday ritual to our children.

But the sense of freedom as we cycled down the familiar country lanes on a misty early Autumn afternoon was worth it. A rare moment much dreamed of that lived up to it’s promise.

We were able to stay on the pathways and quiet country roads of the Sustrans National Cycle Route 24 all day and for the most part it was well signposted and well maintained. First, it took us to Radstock and down the Colliers Way to Frome. This follows the path of the old Somersetshire Coal Canal, then railway, now a gentle, leafy track.

Freedom…

Frome, with street stream

After lunch in Frome, the route took us through the centre of Longleat Safari Park where we enjoyed the solitude and unusual deep roars of lions mixed with the more familiar sound of sheep. For the final 25km we cruised down the Wylye Valley, gently descending with the river to the welcome sight of our inn on the edge of Salisbury, arriving just before dark.

3 things we learnt today:

Chamois cream is surprisingly tingly.
It’s difficult to take a picture while balancing a fully loaded bike.
Cycle at dusk near a river with your mouth open and you swallow a lot of flies.

Finally, we have a question…

Clare is carrying 14kg, Andy 15kg. But Andy weighs 95kg and Clare only weighs 55kg. Should Andy take more weight?

Rough Route

Here’s our rough route:

Stage 1: Bath to Portsmouth

route-1

Stage 2: St. Malo to Angers on the Loire river

Stage3: Up the Loire to Amboise (or whenever we get bored of Chateaus)

Stage 4: Amboise to La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast

Stage 5: Down the coast to Bordeaux

Stage 6: Through the wine country to Toulouse

Stage 7: Down to Carcassonne, then over the Pyrenees to Barcelona

Simples!

Getting Ready

“Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man to cycle and he will realise fishing is stupid and boring.”
Desmond Tutu

We are not real cyclists. We’ve managed just two weekend cycling trips in the last two years to get ready for this trip. Both were memorable, around the Isle of Wight (75m/120km) and a return trip to Cheddar (70m/112km) which included a spectacular ride up the Cheddar Gorge. We packed lightly both times. So lightly in fact that Andy forgot to include any trousers on the Cheddar trip and had to sneak into the restaurant in his new padded cycling shorts. From both weekend trips we returned utterly exhausted.

We’ve managed just one cycling ‘Sportive’ (63m/101km). These are excellent and increasingly popular mass riding events, full of impressively fit looking MAMILs (middle-aged-men-in-lycra). But we decided they weren’t for us as we trudged in well behind the pack in the evening gloom. And we’re not that keen on lycra anyway!

We’ve not yet tried cycling with full panniers. We’ve not yet had to fix a puncture by the roadside. We’ve not yet cycled out of reach of a coffee shop.

We have been on lots of 20-30 mile bike rides over the last two years and feel very fortunate to live in Bath where there are many beautiful cycle tracks in the surrounding countryside. It’s also quite hilly so we are used to going up modest gradients. Feeling we should get better prepared last weekend, we packed some heavy books (A Complete Guide to Family Health, Art of the 20th Century, The Gardeners Encyclopedia of Plants and Flowers etc.) into our panniers and set off. The hills felt a lot harder.

*Practising with heavy books instead of luggage*

We have also got used to much of our gear. The trickiest things to get used to were the cleated shoes. For a cyclist there is nothing more alarming than the split second of realisation that with cleats firmly stuck in the pedals, there is now nothing you can do to avoid toppling over sideways. Apart from swear loudly! Andy learnt this lesson within 500m of our house, when he first tried cleating in. Coming to a busy junction he forgot all about his feet being stuck to the pedals and toppled over taking Clare down with him. As we untangled arms, wheels, legs and handlebars the window of the nearest 4×4 slid down and a female voice shouted to Clare that “you’ve got a right one there, haven’t you love!”

We learnt a similar lesson when climbing steeper hills – never change gear on the front derailleur or you instantly grind to a halt with painful consequences. After kissing the tarmac several times Clare now only clips on one side on any hill. This causes our real cycling friends to cry out in horror at the waste of uphill climbing power.

*Tuning the gears on the back of the car*

We attended an excellent bike maintenance course at Bristol Bike Project, a local charity that provide bikes to people who can’t otherwise afford them. We learnt to replace tyres, inner tubes, chain links, cables and to tune our gears and set our brakes correctly. It was brilliant!

This recently came to good use when we took our bikes into the local bike shop for a service. On a ride that same evening they purred like a finely tuned sports car. We absolutely whizzed along. Until that is we got lost, took a narrow bumpy path and had to haul the bikes over a barbed wire fence. We all survived but the gears were completely out of sync again.

Rather than offload another 50 quid we decided to give it a go ourselves and spent two hours working on the gears the next day. After the first hour we were ready to give up and head back to the shop as the chains crunched and jumped around. Then something clicked and the bikes started to purr and hum again. All the more satisfying for doing it ourselves – we’ll see whether our maintenance skills are up to scratch all the way to Barcelona?

Shopping for some nice new gear, here are some of the things we’ve bought or been given:

Some padded lycra cycling gear – yes we’ve succumbed
Lightweight travel towels made of polyester and nylon
Bright yellow helmets – so car drivers can see us
Chamois cream – to protect our groin and buttock areas
Lube – for the bikes
Spare spokes, brakepads and inner tubes
Super strong Gorilla tape – the guy in the bike shop assured us this will sort any problem

p1010757 — *No danger of missing Eastenders*

Andy’s friend, Digital Dave, is responsible for many of the better bits of kit. Dave is a font of all knowledge – bikes, apps, outdoor stuff etc. etc. We have a Quad Lock fitting system to put our phones right where we want them on our handlebars, View Ranger mapping software and Andy has a (rather expensive) special moisture wicking cycling shirt.

That just leaves the one luxury item we’re each allowing ourselves. Clare’s taking a hairdryer to get rid of the dreaded ‘helmet hair’ look. Andy’s contemplating a pillow, having had bad nights with the hard cylindrical rolls favoured by cheaper French hotels.

We’ll let you know if it makes the cut.

Clare and Andy