We had a couple of days off in St Alban’s – surely one of the hilliest cities in England – to see my Aunt and take her out for lunch. Dementia is horrible and it’s always sad to see her deterioration but we had a nice time with her going to the Cathedral and a wander around this wonderful old church.
Naturally when we returned to our Airbnb, having used Taxis all day Tilly had a puncture, obviously feeling aggreived by our betrayal in leaving her for the day. It was the front so it’s a 5 minute job to change, once you’ve found the tyre levers, and a 40 minute job to get the flippin thorn out of the tyre, which we eventually had to concede as a hopeless task and resorted to a new tyre. The thorn had gone in to one of the nobbly bits and you couldn’t pull it or push it out.
We were away bright and early the next day and greeted by a ferocious wind, fortunately not against us for once! We even had some help from time to time, and were lucky enough to just be blown along when our route turned in the right direction but most of the time we were side on and frequently got walloped by a gust when there were gaps in the protecting hedges. Despite this it was a really nice cycle and we rolled up in Bedford for another night at another Premier inn.
We’ve brought our tent this trip and aimed to camp as hotel prices recently seemed to have gone through the roof, but we’ve actually found that for some unknown reason hotels on our route are really quite cheap at the moment. Our London hotel was a bargain £62 and that was for the posh toffs (Premium Room) rooms at Premier Inn, not the normal plebs rooms we normally stay in, and again in Bedford it was £58 for the plebs rooms. Looking at the camping nearby some were £35 for a tent and two people… absolutely no brainer.. hotel beds for us then! I think the days of a £15 site are long gone and maybe we should take a leaf out of our friend Pete’s book and wild camp… err, but probably not, we’re old softies and like a shower at the end of the day, not to mention easy access toilets at 1am, 3am etc….
The ride to Bedford was very undulating but quite pretty and we were very impressed with the cycling infrastructure in both Luton, which wasn’t our favourite town though it had a very Poirot like town hall, and Bedford, where we found our hotel right on the river.
Premier Inns always find a place for your bike. They say they will on their website and they say that the storage place won’t be in your room either unless that’s what you wish. When you roll up at reception there’s various types of receptionist, the first type leads with “ooo, I don’t know where we can put that” or “We won’t be able to store that anywhere” and the other “Let me see what I can do”. We’ve stayed in dozens of Premier Inns and they always find somewhere safe for Tilly and we can never understand why anyone starts with such a negative attitude when they always find space for it anyway and usually the space is big enough for 4 or 5 tandems. It’s bizarre. Anyway, London was a negative and Bedford was a positive – so 1-1 on the trip so far. They are really good hotels though, clean, quiet comfortable and we always stay in ones with air con as for some reason you can only open the windows a crack so without a/c the hotels are often like saunas. We’ve learnt the hard way to avoid non a/c Premiers.
From Bedford we stopped short of Peterborough at Stilton, the place the cheese takes its name from and ironically a place where you can’t actually make Stilton as it’s a protected name and can only be made in counties that unfortunately don’t include where Stilton is now located. That’s weird.
The ride there was again lovely with Buckton towers a wonderful find for our lunch stop. We’ve actually stayed at Buckton before and never knew they were there!
We’ve calmed down a bit now on the Anti Cycling infrastructure of the UK, as we’ve left the south there’s more back roads and less barriers – hooray! But our injury list continues. If we were a football team the gaffer would be buying new players .
The latest ailment was poor Linda having toothache. She managed to get an emergency appointment in Peterborough for the next day so we had a short hop on and Linda unexpectedly ended up minus one wisdom tooth which wasn’t ideal when you’ve already booked all your accommodation for the next week and have to cycle living on soup!
We’ve visited Peterborough twice on the bike before and not liked it. It’s got excellent cycling infrastructure, some of the best around and could almost be Dutch in places, but from the directions we’ve arrived before its very tatty and run down. Coming from the south it was completely different as we ran along side the Nene Valley Railway, stopping at the station tea room to watch a teenage boy trying to multitask and do a very good impression of Kevin,(for those of you old enough to know that reference !) but that delayed us long enough so by the time we got a bottle of water and sat down on the platform a steam train rolled up. Perfect. The railway and cycle path go right to the centre of Peterborough along the river and dumped us out at the entrance to our hotel and right next to the dentist! The river area here is lovely, with a large promenade in a park with a theatre cafe and outside tables. Really nice and completely the opposite to our other views of Peterborough.
You shouldn’t exercise after having a tooth out as apparently increased blood pressure could make the wound bleed, so Linda was under strict instructions from the dentist to watch her blood pressure and not try hard the next few days. But as it was only 28km onto Stamford and we were in Lincolnshire – Bomber county -we decided to try it on one engine and a prayer…
We were, of course into the wind and Linda was monitoring her heart rate to keep it below 100, which really did mean “She’s not pedaling on the back” for once was almost true. I don’t really notice any difference to be honest, …. Errr… ok, it was flipping hard work but we stopped for a coffee and rest at a farm cafe which was more like a transport cafe in the middle of nowhere then ran into Burhley House, much more our style!! and stopped for soup lunch and a gander at the grandeur. What a wonderful building that is and a lovely park that you can cycle around! They were getting ready for the horse trials and the jumps looked huge in real life, unlike on the TV. Poor horses!
We stopped to chat to some other cyclists – as you do – and got the usual “err by ‘eck you’ve got a lot of luggage” from people who’ve never cycled toured. You then patiently explain that actually we only have 4 panniers not 8 like other couples on separate bikes would usually have and when we’ve weighed our luggage against other tourers, we are generally lighter and then remark that they seem to have a similar amount of luggage around their bellies to our panniers…. Well, maybe those thoughts don’t actually come out of our mouths!
Anyway, moving on, we’ve never been into Stamford so cycled in and admired the lovely buildings made from stone and stopping to get something easily digestible for Lindas tea. We had planned to walk back into the town from our Airbnb but Linda was flaked out on the sofa about 5 minutes after arriving resting her eyes and nursing a sore face and quite understandably didn’t fancy going back, so we had a very quiet evening in.
The next day hurricane ‘Get used to it this is climate change’ rolled in and again we were fortunate that it was behind us up to Sleaford. We had booked a campsite for the night but Linda really wasn’t up to it and having not been able to eat much but still churning out the miles didn’t relish the thought of dealing with a tent in stormy conditions..
It was lovely ride and we met a fabulous elderly couple in a coffee shop Steve and Dorothy who loved cycljng and spent far too long talking about cycle touring!
We then had a wind assisted final section for the day into Sleaford where the wind blew us along at 25kph. I wouldn’t have wanted to be going the other way!
Lincolnshire – at least the bit on the edge of the fens – is gorgeous. Stone houses, deserted lanes and in plenty of places you couldn’t hear the constant roar of traffic, not even those dick heads in their cars with exhaust that backfire when they slow down spelling out in morse code, “I’m a Pratt”
The weather was a mixed bag. Up to Sleaford it was fab, then the next day we had the beginning of our next Storm, Storm Lillian. It started off breezy and sunny, then clouded over and tipped it down and then came out into a gorgeous sunny afternoon where we sat on a bench on the old railway leading into Lincoln from the east and had our sarnies
We stopped at the same hotel in Lincoln that we did last year, checking in with the same lady too, who remembered us, and had a day off to get the train to Nottingham to see Charlie. There’s some great cycle paths to get to Nottingham, but last time we tried that we actually had to get someone to help us lift Tilly over some of the barriers so not playing that game again and let the train take the strain.
The Storm got much worse when we left Lincoln and as we headed to Epworth it was so windy we couldn’t cycle over Fleggboroigh viaduct as it was just too windy to stay upright. Fortunately the railway was tree lined so we had a nice windbreak and then turned off it northwards with the storm helping us along nicely until we got a few kms from Epworth.
We had pre booked a day off the next day, which was just as well as it was an uncyclable day with the Lillian giving all she had howling and gusting with us thankfully tucked up in a very nice loft style Airbnb..
Not good about the tooth Linda …. as you say … Things can only get better!