The blog that never happened!

Radio silence since Devon, oh dear. The reason being I had no computer access on my final weekend of this marathon trip so now there's lots to update you on...

Devon and Cornwall are both beautiful counties to be sure but coming at the end of the best part of a 4,000km road trip they are perhaps not an ideal place for a weary middle-aged cyclist to finish! The price for stunning views here is steep ascents and hair-raising descents and frankly I would have given my right pedal to finish this journey in East Anglia!  However, I'm proud to say I made it, spurred on by the generous hospitality and kindliness of my hosts. 

But, as many of you know, I didn't make it on the date I'd expected to finish :-(  My final weekend in Cornwall became increasingly damp and misty and I awoke on Monday morning to a heavy mist or light fog.  Undaunted, I set off along the country lanes near Lands End towards Penzance and it was only when I realised that I wasn't spotting oncoming cars' headlamps until they were less than 200 yards away that it dawned on me that drivers would not see my puny bike lights until they were nearly on top of me.  I felt like an accident waiting to happen.  Angry and disappointed I pedalled into Penzance station and boarded a train, did the wise thing and came home only a 100 kms short of my goal.

But David was there to greet me when I arrived, with a smile on his face; he had consulted his diary, the weather forecast, booked a couple of B&Bs so that he could drive me back to complete the journey the following week :-)  How good was that? I was so thrilled not to be cheated of a quietly triumphant pedal over the bridge and up the hill to Looe station and to have David share this final leg of the journey with me.

This week the weather was perfect and I was in the perfect frame of mind to complete this marathon experience.  The previous week I had been weary and focussed on the goal of crossing the finishing line.  This week I was back to enjoying the journey, revelling in every minute of the experience, the sights, the smells, the sounds and the beauty all around me.  True to form, the sat nav gave me one final laugh a few kilometres outside Looe when it tried to have me cut through a dense hedgerow and across a trackless field but I've learnt to live with its foibles!! 

What I wasn't ready for was the emotion I felt as I pedalled into Looe station where I'd started on 17th July.  I found myself fast-forwarding through the past few weeks in the saddle and the reality of this adventure began to sink in - the beauty and variety of the landscape, the colours, the views, the solitude, the peace and the freedom I'd felt. I hadn't set out to cycle around the coast for my own benefit, I'd done it to raise money for the training village in Malawi, and yet I have benefitted so much from the whole experience.  This is something that will always stay with me.

On the homeward stretch

Last time I blogged I was in a foreign country, well Wales, and it was with surprising joy that I crossed over the Severn back into England last Wednesday.  I can't say that joy persisted as I struggled to navigate my way over, under, around endless rivers and motorways in the Avonmouth area.  However, pure joy awaited me in Bridgewater in the form of a replacement sat nav, complete with OS maps uploaded - yippeee!  

It's amazing how much slower a ride becomes when you are trying to memorise the next 3 or 4 directions, then you have to stop and consult the map again for the next instructions.  Cycling analogue as my brother, Jim, puts it is definitely much slower and, with my map-reading skills, not necessarily more reliable than going with the technology.  Just as well David was working from home that day and could keep an eye on me via the app on his phone :-)

Since Bridgewater I have had the joy of a sat nav that works and made it to Porlock and then Lynton without hitch.  Not far in miles but both days made up for that in elevation!  However, the views were spectacular at times and well worth the effort.  The dreaded Porlock Hill has a cycle route which zigzags around the hill, achieving the same elevation but much more manageably.  It feels a bit like doing Box Hill 5 times in succession - the Olympians have got nothing on me!!!

Arriving in Devon gave me a real lift - only one more county to conquer after this. In fact, 2 more days on the road and I'll be back in Cornwall - ok, so it's chock-a-block with steep hills careering down into coves and back out again, but who cares? 5 more days of Cornwall and I'm back where I started, in Looe.  Not that I'm counting or anything!

The whole trip has been an amazing experience and to tell the truth I can't quite believe that I've done it.  When David showed me on the map showing me all the spots I'd tweeted from, I just started chuckling.  Seeing a visual representation of what I've done just made me laugh in disbelief.  But now is not the time to wrap up this blog with reminiscences, I shall leave that for my final post next week...

Thoughts from the road - St David's onwards

Well, I guess it's just as well I didn't write this blog the day I set off from St David's and said goodbye to my David because then this post would just have been filled with gloom and doom! This whole venture has been a real adventure for me, it's been exciting, challenging, fun and a fantastic experience overall but to tell the truth it has had its downside as well.  Saying goodbye to David after a lovely week together relaxing and recharging my batteries brought it home to me all the more how much I have missed him and the girls.  The temptation to chuck in the towel and put my bike on the back of the car and go home with him was great indeed. I suppose I'd also been spoiled having my brother's company all the way from Morecambe to St David's and now I was setting off alone again, the sky was overcast and I was feeling thoroughly sorry for myself.

I'd like to say that I thought altruistic thoughts about the people in Malawi whose lives will be affected for the better by the Landirani Training Village that I'm raising funds for, but no, that wasn't the case.  Do any of you remember Ian Dury and the Blockheads?  Well, the thought that came into my head was a line from one of his songs 'Reasons to be Cheerful, One, Two, Three'.  For those of you who don't know this band, Ian Dury rose to fame in the 70s as a punk rocker and the unusual thing about that was that he was disabled by polio. However that didn't stop him from becoming a star.  So I headed out of the tiny city of St David's, not with thoughts of the patron saint of Wales in my head but the rather raucous punk rock music of Ian Dury buzzing round my brain. Well, they say God works in mysterious ways and He certainly does because this song soon got me working out reasons I have to be cheerful and here are three of mine:

• I have a supportive family and a great bunch of friends, Fb and others, who are willing me on
• there have been an amazing range of people all round the country who have opened up their homes to me and welcomed me in and there are more who I've yet to meet
• all day and every day I have this wonderful landscape to feast my eyes on - we really do live in a beautiful country 

And frankly, I hadn't cycled many miles before I had compiled a list as long as my arm and was feeling thoroughly cheerful again :-)

Another reason to be cheerful is the state of the roads in Wales.  From a cyclist's point of view their roads are excellent: the surfaces are generally good, potholes filled, cycle lanes where possible alongside main roads, well sign-posted cycle routes (or maybe I've just become more adept at spotting the signs) and quite a few of these routes seem fairly recently tarmac'ed.  All in all very impressive, 10/10 Wales :-)  

What also made cycling easy for me here was having my brother, Jim, for company.  He is a much more experienced cyclist and has this uncanny ability to cycle at a steady pace so all I had to do was slot in behind him.  Well, actually that's easier said than done for a Tigger like me.  One minute I'd be dutifully on his tail and then I'd find I'd randomly dropped back a few hundred yards and was speeding to catch up again.  Pedalling at a steady pace is evidently an art I've yet to learn!  It reminded me of the holiday David and I had cycling the length of the Outer Hebrides when I would pootle along and then suddenly whizz on ahead to see what was round the corner, double-back to tell David about the amazing view up ahead, pedal with him and then speed up the incline to encourage him that it soon flattened out, double-back again to join him so he wouldn't  give up... And then I wondered why he found cycling with me so demotivating!!! It must be hard for Winnie the Pooh to live with Tigger.

So here's hoping I can bounce my way along the remainder of the south Wales coastline and the next blog will come from England once more - homeward bound :-)

Language learning on the road

Well, 42 days into this venture - 28 of them actual cycling days - I find myself in a foreign country. No, I haven't inadvertently cycled into the Channel tunnel and ended up in France - my brother Jim and I crossed the Wirral and ended up in Wales.  To be fair, the country doesn't seem foreign and nor do the people but the language certainly does. Sometimes it seems like someone has strung together a load of consonants and expects them to be pronounceable! Well, being by nature a lover of languages and a firm believer that when in Rome, speak as the Romans do, I decided not to be disconcerted by every road sign in Welsh and English but to use them as my teacher.

The first Welsh I picked up was "Croeso y Cymru" and I thought how nice to be formally welcomed to Wales before I'd even met any of the lovely people my brother and I were to encounter on our ride through this beautiful country.  The sign I saw most often was "safle bws" and yes, they do queue in an orderly fashion for the buses here just as we do in England :-)  Speeding down a 20% descent I also quickly learned why "araf" is painted before every bend on the road - if you haven't guessed, it means "slow".  For some reason we both found "dim parcio" funny - perhaps because it sounds a bit Italian and that seemed incongruous and perhaps because it reminded me of how people park in such daft ways, but in fact it means "no parking".  As Jim and I were slogging up a hill we spotted a sign "pant cudd" and I thought yes, not only could I but I am puffing and panting, thank you!  We discovered it was warning us of a hidden dip which at least allowed us to pick up a bit of speed.  Knowing that "araf" means "slow" it didn't take much to guess that "arafwch nawr" means "slow down now" and sure enough that was confirmed by the English "reduce speed now". Other signs were "Ar werth" - For sale, "ysgol" - school, "ffordd" - road, "siocled" - chocolate (the most important word to know in any language) and my favourite of all is "twmpathau" which are speed bumps - no idea why that word appeals but reading it just makes me happy.

So I reckon a few more weeks in this beautiful country and I could be holding conversations along the lines of:
- See the house by the bus stop?
- You mean the one next to the school?
- No, further down the road where the speed bumps are.
- Ah, the one with the For sale sign up.
- Yes, it was painted chocolate brown last year.
Or maybe I should just accept my linguistic limitations and stick to English!  And perhaps it's just as well I only have a few more days cycling in Wales before I cross the Severn bridge and back to familiar monolingual road signs.
  

R.I.P.

R.I.P. - Rest in Peace.  No, this is not to announce that I'm posting this from the great computer in the sky, on the contrary, I am safe and well and have survived more stretches on A-roads than I care to remember.  No, it is my untrusty little sat nav who is now resting in peace back at the Garmin factory where it came from.  Yes, I know we had a love-hate relationship but over the miles from Looe to Berwick on Tweed I had adapted considerably to its idiosyncrasies - it clearly was refusing to adapt to mine, so I was going to have to be the bigger person here.  And adapt I did and from Carlisle onwards we were jogging along together quite nicely; I was no longer fazed when the sat nav threw up a random instruction for a split second before correcting itself and carrying on as though nothing had happened; or when the screen froze after the last instruction I would calmly get out my iPhone and take a look at the maps there to get a rough idea of where I should be heading.  The sat nav had definitely developed a lot of quirks, sometimes it gave me the silent treatment so I either risked missing a turn or kept my eyes glued to it and risked riding off into a hedge or ditch but between us we were making our way around the coast and that's all that matters.

Well, truth to tell, it wasn't only between the sat nav and me - I had a lot (and I mean a lot) of phone calls from David bailing me out when I'd gone wrong or phoning simply to say "you don't seem to be moving, is there a problem?" which there invariably was.  Now, you might well be wondering how on earth David knows where I am at any given point or whether I've stopped or am belting down an A-road as fast as my little legs can carry me.  This is not a case of Big Brother is watching you, more a case of Big Husband is watching you - via a nifty app on his iPhone.

So, did I throw this sometimes frustrating but very necessary little machine into the sea in a fit of pique?  No, I was cycling into Southport on Tuesday evening when the screen went blank.  I assumed the battery had died but knowing I was nearly there I navigated the rest of the way with the iPhone, charged the battery overnight, turned it on the next morning to guide me through Liverpool, across the Wirral and into Flint in N Wales - and the screen flickered into life and promptly died on me :-(   I mourned its passing all day, especially as I had to go analogue and buy 3 different Landranger maps to get me the 60 miles (100 kms) from Southport to Flint and I still got very lost on the Wirral!

I say "I" but actually it was "we" because my brother, Jim, has come over from Germany where he lives to join me for the stretch from Morecambe to St David's - so, being without a sat nav and getting badly lost wasn't such a daunting experience as it would otherwise have been.  Jim has been a tower of strength, two heads are always better than one and it's very comforting simply to cycle in his slip stream.

So, there we were in Heswall, well gone five o'clock, with unscheduled B&B thoughts buzzing round our heads - where were you Jackie of Heswall? However, we finally made it to Flint having been on the road for the best part of 12 hours.

Tomorrow, Bangor, opposite Anglesey, here we come! Jim was last there as a student just under 40 years ago when he studied there: a trip up many a hill and down memory lane.

Has the road changed me?

Well, looking at the nifty little map that Tom Nicholas devised to plot my journey it seems that I'm over half way now in terms of mileage, although perhaps not in terms of elevation.  http://tweetedtrips.com/map/408/sarah-bowen-aroundthecoast/?loggedout=hjtw6w8d4ptydpf
So it seems like an appropriate time to let you in on a few little secrets... This journey has changed me. And the first secret is I LOVE BEING ON THE OPEN ROAD! There, I've said it now and I feel much better for getting that off my chest.

But that's not the only change. To explain the next one I need to introduce you to one of my hosts from the south coast. Now I don't usually talk about my hosts but in this case I have Charles' permission. His wife, however, shall remain nameless because I sense she would prefer it that way. Now Charles is a very affable man and, like all my other hosts, he and his wife went out of their way to make me feel welcome. This included the offer of pre-dinner drinks. I explained to Charles that I don't drink, not because I have anything against drinking but simply because I've never found a drink
I like - apart from the very occasional Snowball but that is truly very occasional because advocat goes off so it isn't worth buying a bottle. Well, this news greatly perturbed poor Charles who was not to be defeated and asked if I'd ever tried Pimms. No, I hadn't but clearly I was about to! And guess what? It was delicious and I just about downed it in one. After that Charles, wise man that he is, kept me topped up with fruit juice :-) A bottle of Pimms was promptly added to my birthday present list. Then matters got worse when I reached Holy Island and discovered Lindisfarne mead and cream liqueur - sheer nectar!  The trouble with all this is that my dear hubby, who has enjoyed the uninterrupted services of a chauffeur home from dinner parties and other social events for the last 30 years or more, is not going to enjoy taking it in turns now!

Another change is that I've taken up singing. Well, not necessarily out loud because I don't want to
frighten the wildlife, but certainly in my head and I think it's about time I taught you a couple of my favourite pedalling songs that have been helping me up the hills. Now you need to get into the rhythm of this one...
Left - left - left right left
I left my job
For thirty bob
M'boss and me
Could never agree
So I left
D'you think I was
.. Right?

Now this little ditty can be repeated endlessly until you get to the top of the hill no matter how high or long it is.
Another favourite, and forgive me those of you who don't have children and so may not know the tune to this one, but if you search for "the wheels on the bus" on YouTube you should get a fairly cheerful rendition of the original. My version goes as follows:
The pedals on the bike go round and round
Round and round
Round and round
The pedals on the bike go round and round
All day long

The gears on the bike go clunk clunk clunk
Clunk clunk clunk ...

The rider on the bike goes puff puff puff...
The brakes on the bike go squeak squeak squeak...

Yes, I can see you've got the hang of it already! It's amazing how fertile the human brain is and how many extra verses you can make up. Do let me know of any interesting ones you may come up with, I think I'm going to need to make this song very long indeed to get me round Wales.

I'm sure there will be a few more changes before 1st Oct when I finally cycle back in to Looe to catch my train home, but that's enough for now.  Till next time

A hypochondriac on the road

I suppose it's only fair to assume that something close to a 4,000km ride on a new bike powered by a 56 year old body is asking for trouble and the trouble is that I tend to think that my body is as fit and strong as it was aged 26 and I probably had this assumption in mind when planning the whole venture...

I started out with a gammy right ankle - a legacy of school days and too much lacrosse on freezing cold Saturday mornings.  It's a brutal game, played by posh girls who, underneath their plummy accents, are infinitely more brutal than the Native American Indians who invented the game.  In addition to that I have a dodgy left knee which is a left over from my running days and these also triggered problems in my right hip - I swear running should come with a health warning, a bit like packets of cigarettes.  Anyway, it was these three ailments that pushed me back into cycling a couple of years ago.  I'd always loved cycling, ever since I fell off my bike as a child and broke my arm - but that's another story.  So, I was doing really well with my training last year until I slipped on the ice in Reykjavik last December and managed to break my shoulder.  That kept me off my bike for a good 3 months, although I did make it to some spin classes after a month trying to keep up with the other sweaties, my left arm dangling limply by my side...

Well, the old joints seemed to be bearing up tolerably well for the first few days until the left knee started to play up a bit.  I think I must have mentioned this somewhere along the way and whoever has been offering prayers for my left knee, thank you very much. You'll be pleased to know that it has been absolutely fine since and in fact the right ankle, left knee, right hip and left shoulder have all been behaving themselves perfectly - don't you just love the symmetry of my ailments?  Now, I think I may have mentioned the effects on the hands of leaning too long on the handlebars.  Well, I can only assume that although I must lean very heavily on them and have probably compressed the nerves as flat as pancakes by now, someone out there has been praying for that too because my hands have not got nearly as bad as I would have expected.  Yes, my fingers still feel like 8 fat chipolatas and 2 fat cocktail sausages but I still have some use of them: doing up buttons and zips is difficult, I can hold a knife and fork in a reasonably civilised fashion but cutting up food is tricky, I can brush my hair but putting on eyeliner becomes a dangerous sport... and so the list goes on.  In fact, most of the things I struggle with are ADLs - actions of daily living - maybe I should apply for benefits!!

Now to this list of woes I really should add my wonky eyes: chronically short-sighted at the best of times I now have the added feature of double vision.  Not such a bad thing when watching a George Clooney film but less appealing when the oncoming juggernaut ominously splits into one and a half and then sometimes two, half of which appears to be heading straight for you and you're not quite sure where on the road it is in reality until it's passed you. At which point, you heave a deep sigh of relief.  Now, wonky though it is, I treasure my vision because it's the only vision I've got even though prescription glasses can't make it 20/20. So when I'm pedalling along minding my own business and suddenly notice a small dark splodge distorting my vision, I can't help but panic just a teeny bit.  Is my retina getting detached?  Am I about to go blind??  I shake my head in the hopes that dark splodge will disappear (probably the worst thing to do if it is the retina) but no, it's still there, just off the centre of my line of vision.  Then another one appears and I start to get seriously worried and begin to sympathise with Saul on the Damascus Road - poor bloke, but at least he was only blind for 3 days and had an amazing career after that.  But I digress.  I'm now cycling along like Cyclops and wondering what I should do.  I force myself to squint and focus on one of the dark splodges and then it dawns on me... I stop, take off my glasses, flick off two tiny insects and carry on.  Phew, wonky sight restored!

I could tell you about the pain in one of my right ribs ever since I slipped in the bath in Harwich, I was convinced it was broken and about to pierce my lung and I'd die from lack of breath, but I'm still here, still cycling, so I guess I just have to live with being an incorrigible hypochondriac until the day I die - and moan: I told you I was feeling ill.