Booked the PCR test for tomorrow. Results 24 hours later and valid for 3 days, so that means I will absolutely be in France by Monday, but probably before. Looks like it will only take a couple of days max to get to Dover. All feelings of overwhelm have gone and am now just itching to go and super excited. From reading the blog to starting en route, 10 days. Would have been nice to have done it within a week, it just appeals to me. But hey, I am doing it. Told a few more people now, mainly my neighbours who want to give me a send off the night before.
Still stuff to buy and send back, including my original tent that just arrived. Off to Balfe’s to buy some lights, a pump, inner tubes and a really cool and expensive multi tool gadget useful for all sorts of repairs. Barry also gave me an emergency kit of stuff I may need. No idea what to do with any of the bits and pieces but as he pointed out, if something goes wrong, you can always look it up on YouTube, but you’ll need the pieces – so now you have them.
My bike is an own brand from Evans Cycles, a Pinnacle Neon. It’s a hybrid which I had bought for about £650 a few years ago when I decided to cycle from Lands End to John O’Groats. I bought it to replace my previous Giant model which had been forged from steel, held together with rivets and topped with a big bouncy saddle - or at least that’s how I remember it. Still, that baby got me all the way to the Hague via some WW I battlefields back in 2016.
On that trip, I had originally planned to cycle to Amsterdam in a week but the whole trip turned out to be a catalogue of disasters, starting off with the wrong train to Dover, then being physically attacked and shat on by vicious seagulls when I was forced to cycle past within a hairs breadth of their nesting sites as I left the ferry at Dieppe (which was nowhere near Dieppe), mistakenly turning onto autoroutes in torrential rain with huge lorries either honking, missing me by millimetres or both, unending torrential rain every day after that, a puncture far from any town centre in the middle of a downpour with no possibility of repairing it anyway as I had not innertubes etc, accommodation not being available as I turned up sodden after walking for a couple of hours with my broken bike even though I had booked and finally, waking up in The Hague to the news that Britain had left the EU. I had forked out for the poshest suite at the Park Plaza Vondelpark in Amsterdam for a couple of nights at the scheduled end, to celebrate what would have been my first ever proper cycle trip, but the EU result was the final straw in that shitstorm of a week, so I just wanted to get home ASAP and there was a ferry from the Hague with my name on it leaving that morning.
I have to say though, the one thing that was never a problem on that trip was my actual bicycle itself; I just got on with it as I didn’t know any better. It’s only when you take up cycling on a more regular basis and learn about cycles do you realise what a Heffalump that old banger of a bike was, loaded down as it was with overstuffed panniers and extra heavy-duty locks. True, there were few hills to negotiate on that short trip, but still…
There’s a lesson in there somewhere, something along the lines of ignoring naysayers and doom merchants who tell you things are impossible and just ploughing ahead regardless.
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