Those of you who know me well will know I think of Shakespeare in the same light as Enid Blighton, Farage and Trump. I know people like them but I just don’t understand why. Bet you never thought you’d see a sentence with those four people in it did you? Anyway, his quote is appropriate for our departure day. It’s always sad to leave home, especially when you leave someone elderly – my Dad, Bob, is 91, though he seems to have moved the decimal point and is thoroughly enjoying his second childhood. He’s great fun to be with and is such a real character in his local village. He’d be with us in a shot if he could and he loves us travelling, but it’s hard to leave him behind, even for a ‘Get me out of here’ anti Brexiter. Anyway, we’re off and running, well cycling. Tilly is loaded to the gunnels – I’m not sure what the bike equivalent is – and we weigh in at a brake pad scaring 225kgs including 2 kilos of Cadbury Chocolate that my sister in law bought for me for my birthday and we haven’t eaten yet. Hopefully we’ll be a lot lighter in a month or two as we get fit, but if we eat all the chocolate maybe we’ll just get fat instead.
Our first stop was the cosmopolitan town of Ipswich, we cycled past Portman Road, the home of Ipswich Town Football Club on the way to our hotel. When I was young this was a place where I’d go to watch attacking skillful football and the only place in East Anglia where any major trophy was ever won. The football today is played in a style so opposite to those heady Bobby Robson’s days that watching paint dry ( or possibly reading Shakespeare) seems more appealing.
We’d had a shortish 40km start day planned but a road closure and my misinterpretation of the A12 as a cycle path led to an extra 10km diversion, but the extra mileage allowed an extra cake stop so can’t complain!
After setting fire to the Pentahotels kitchen when we cooked some toast our relaxed day two took us right past Taffy in storage and to the typically quaint and picturesque pub The Angel Inn, in Stoke By Nayland. You have a big Hill to climb to get there – a 55m elevation at 7%, which is a big Hill for Suffolk, so the evenings plan was, seat by the fire, drink in hand and a nice meal. Trouble is the menu, like most at posh places these days, seems to get longer and longer. Not through more choice but through the paragraphs used to describe each offering. Gone are the days of Egg and Chips, welcome to the Local hand reared, corn fed rare breed chicken eggs and locally grown organic chips, fried in a light classic olive oil from some forgotten hillside town in Italy (that no one’s ever heard of or even cares about as they’re really hungry and just want egg and chips,) and bottled by and 85 year old woman, by hand no less, who had three children and 256 grandchildren… etc etc. It’s egg and chips for goodness sake, not war and peace! And Incidentally, the Angel Inn wouldn’t be seen dead offering it anyway. Rant over.
[tag 2017, suffolk, tilly]
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