What happens with big plans like cycling tours is they evolve over time. There may be several iterations from the original day dream over a Sunday morning cappuccino, through to the final plan that is eventually implemented.
My original plan for this trip was to meander my way from my adopted home of Shrewsbury down through the midlands, home counties, London(!), and Kent before arriving at Dover for the short hop by ferry across the channel to Calais. Once on mainland European soil I would head north east into Belgium and enter the Netherlands from its southern most province of Zeeland. However, when discussing these plans with various friends and colleagues I received several puzzled expressions as to why my plan was not to take the ferry from Newcastle to Amsterdam…this would reduce the distance to Norway (my first key destination) and allow for a detour to the family home in Teesside.
So the plan was changed – after handing in the keys to my flat I would load up the bike and cycle my way from Shrewsbury to Newcastle ferry terminal, with a pit stop at home to disburden my panniers of their more bizarre extra baggage and refine the setup before setting off to Europe. I suspect this will not be the first change of plan on my journey.
Day 1 – Escape from the Shire
Picking up from my last blog post, with every pannier and luggage bag approaching the point of bursting, I officially set off from Shrewsbury town centre at around 16:45 on the 14th of April. Unless you’re a fan of stopping just as you’re getting started, putting up tents in the dark, or gnashing your teeth and riding on through the night, I would not recommend 16:45 as a departure time on a normal day’s cycle touring.
So with time against me and darkness encroaching I wrestled control of the bike’s antler-esque handlebars and headed east for the delightfully named village of Upton Magna around 10km away.
Undeniably my first impression was how immensely heavy the bike was compared to anything I have ridden before. I don’t know how it compares to other touring bike setups (I’ve seen some real juggernauts in YouTube videos), but for me it was heavy. However, although the acceleration is slow, once you reach cruising speed the bike has so much momentum it seems to almost launch itself up the road’s smaller rises and undulations.
The more worrisome handling quirk was a peculiar oscillation in the handlebars. The sensation was similar to the dreaded ‘speed wobble’, where the bike (either pedal or motorbike) begins to leer from side-to-side at a resonant frequency, which if not corrected can eventually eject the unlucky rider from the comfort of their seat. But this wobble was occurring at lower speeds. I assumed it was down to too much weight in the handlebar bag and carried on.
Slow acceleration and wobbles put to one side, I was pretty satisfied with the bike and how it handled the weight. It can be a bit daunting when you first climb onto a fully loaded tourer, but as with most skills, with time it becomes second nature.
The road network of north Shropshire has several smaller lanes where the tarmac gives way to more of a dirt road or gravel track. I don’t know if it was down to the unusually dry start to the year we’d had, but I managed to include a road on my route that morphed from gravel into pure sand. I can now confirm it is possible to pedal a fully loaded tourer through deep sand, but I do not recommend it at high speeds, mainly due to the front wheel having a mind of its own. I cut my losses, got off and pushed…I had already succumbed to pushing the damn thing (known as ‘hike-a-bike’ in the lingo) and I hadn’t even got out of Shropshire. I will need to up my game when it comes to the dirt roads of southern Europe.
With the light now fading and unwelcome arrival of rain, I fumbled my way around Google Maps and found a campsite near the Staffordshire border, around one hour’s cycle away. I arrived in darkness to signs suggesting the presence of a campsite but no obvious entrance or reception. It turns out this particular campsite falls into the category of “farmer’s revenue diversification”, aka a small field with the grass kept low, a single bog, shower, and a basin for washing pots – no frills. It also happened to sit adjacent to the west coast mainline railway line, frequented by both passenger and freight trains at a good 100mph+.
Though basic, the campsite was fine for my needs, so I got to work on pitching my MSR Hubba Hubba NX 2-person tent outside for the first time (I did once put it up without pegs in the living room). At the time I would have paid good money to anyone with deity like powers to stop the rain from falling at that moment, and perhaps even bring back a few rays of sunlight, but sometimes a baptism of fire can strengthen the constitution, or at least set a bloody low baseline for your future camping endeavours. The inner tent got frustratingly wet during construction, a situation not helped by my immediate breaking of the cardinal rule by getting inside with my (soggy grass covered) cycling shoes on.
With the tent pitched I moved on to matters of an evening meal. It was now 10pm and I had been surviving thus far on a prematurely devoured Cadbury’s Easter egg (sorry Jesus) and a few remnant wine gums from a jumbo 350g box I had received as a birthday gift. Wine gums are my go-to sugary snack on the bike, preferably Maynard’s but I’ll give any version a try, however I now needed some proper food after such a hectic and tiresome day. So I conjured up a meal from the food I had salvaged from the clear out of my kitchen and squeezed into the panniers…two packs of dried egg noodles, one can of tuna chunks in water, and a good dollop of mayonnaise – I don’t know how that sounds to you, but I can tell you it was like manna from heaven, proper lush!
Day 2 – These hills were made for walking
After the chaos of day 1, the morning of day 2 was a welcome contrast. The rain had passed, and a gentle warmth began to fill the tent as the morning sunlight lit up its red and white angular walls. The trains continued to whoosh by, but they went unnoticed in the peace of that moment, and with the biggest admin hurdles now cleared I could focus on the bike touring and getting an oven-ready plan for Europe.
After a relaxed morning packing up the bike I set off and continued on my north-easterly trajectory towards the Peak District, trying my best to avoid the urban sprawl of Stoke-on-Trent. As a cyclist you find there some areas that just cannot be traversed without going along at least a few busy roads, this part of Staffordshire being one of them.
I would soon start ticking off ‘firsts’ along the way. My first stop at a shop might sound pathetically kindergarten, but the theft paranoia is real, especially when you have never left your new bike and panniers alone in the big wide world before. But guess what? I locked the bike, went into the shop, came back out and et voilà: it was still there, panniers and all. And if any prospective thieves are reading with a ruminating intent to steal from me – unless there is a high demand for unwashed underwear in your area – I don’t leave anything worth nicking on my bike, and if you pinch it anyway, I will find you and I will write about you.
The flat plains of north Shropshire were fast becoming a distant memory as the inclines began to rise. I was entering the foothills of the Peaks, and had to face the reality that I was riding an extremely heavy bike. My touring bike is fitted with a mountain bike gearing system, including an invaluable third ‘granny gear’ on the front set of cogs which gives you the option of a nice easy gear to pedal on the steeper hills, at the cost of moving extremely slowly. The slower you ride a bike the more of a balancing act it becomes, so it is a skill to be honed over time. The best advice I can offer is to leave yourself a buffer zone from the edge to avoid striking your pedal against the kerb and/or getting too boxed in by passing vehicles, and if you ever feel the need to stop simply put your foot down onto the kerb/verge (rather than back into the road).
Before long I was in the realm of hardy hill sheep with a fresh batch of spring lambs hopping around as if their legs contained actual springs, occasionally on the backs of their unamused looking mothers. I had entered the Peak District, and it was here I would face my first properly STEEP hill.
Cast your mind back for a moment to trigonometry class and your protractor (that transparent semicircle of cheap plastic we all carried around in our pencil case), the difference between 6° and 12° doesn’t really look like much: these are the approximate angles of a 10% and 20% climb, and when tackling such inclines on a fully loaded touring bike it is the difference between a minor skirmish and nuclear war. I tried my best to ‘punch’ my way to the top of these climbs (in other words, pedal bloody hard to try and keep a good momentum) but it was just not possible for me to sustain this intensity to the top of the longer climbs. So I swallowed my pride, hopped off the saddle and succumbed to my second hike-a-bike of the trip so far.
At around 6pm in dry conditions with plenty of sunlight ahead, I rolled into what I thought would be my chosen campsite for the night. Now I don’t know exactly what goes on at an ‘adults only’ campsite that would not occur at their family friendly counterparts, but as a man without children I am not against the idea of retaining a few safe spaces to escape the sights, sounds and occasionally smells of other people’s offspring (or perhaps even your own whilst the folks are on grandparent duties). However, I did find the prices at Longnor Wood adult only holiday park to be a bit on the spicy side for my taste, so I continued on to nearby Crowdecote which had the trifecta of a campsite with stunning views, a pub within walking distance, and the satisfying attribute of being just across the border into Derbyshire – a county transition always feels like good progress.
Day 3 – To cycle, or not to cycle
Clearly there will sometimes be days on a long cycle tour where, for some reason or another, you don’t do any cycling. Whether you are rained in, ill, travelling by other modes of transport, having fun doing other activities, writing blogs, the list goes on. The morning after my unexpectedly cold night camping in Crowdecote I was met with the arrival of considerable volumes of rain and, more concerningly, wind. Today there would be no cycling (well, at least no fully loaded cycle touring).
The decision was made to camp an extra night, do a bit of shopping in nearby Buxton, and make the most of The Packhorse Inn’s cosy fireplace, where I soon noticed my fellow campsite neighbours had also taken refuge from the cold with a pie and a pint.
The following day was a much calmer affair on the weather front, so I packed up my ever expanding collection of belongings and got back on the road. I now had some real world experience in riding the loaded bike and utilising the camping system, with some ideas for where improvements could be made (mainly around the reduction and rebalancing of luggage), so I decided to head for the nearby city of Sheffield and hop onto a train to expedite the remaining journey north.
The notion was simple but the act was far from it; one does not simply ‘hop’ onto a British train with a fully loaded touring bike. The train operating company in this instance was CrossCountry Trains. The first hurdle is the famous gap between the train and the platform edge, which at some stations can be quite a chasm, before being met with a double-step up to the floor of the bicycle storage area. I actually had no idea if I would be physically capable of lifting the bike onto the train fully loaded, but the idea of removing panniers from my bike and loading everything in multiple trips amongst the bedlam of passengers coming and going was too much for my nervous system to handle at that point in time, so when the train doors opened and the crowds dispersed I raised the relatively lightweight front of the bike up both steps onto the train floor, planted my foot on the step and rolled the bike forward until the back wheel was touching the edge of the step…I took a deep breath and heaved both myself and the bike onto the train in a deadlift-like forward motion. This worked surprisingly well.
On CrossCountry the bike storage is invariably a vertical rack, whereby the bike needs to be raised onto its back wheel then lifted onto a hook. Now call me a wuss, but this is at best an awkward manoeuvre with a regular unladen bicycle, and a fairly Herculean task with a fully loaded tourer. Now I’m quite partial to a spot of day dreaming, so whilst waiting for the 18:30 to York my imagination was conjuring up visions of an empty, easy to access spot where I could simply lean the bike and secure it with a strap. But fantasy and reality are rarely one and the same.
In the stress of the moment of boarding the train I decided that attempting the ‘vertical bike’ manoeuvre was too difficult and explained to the guard I would happily move the bike before our stop at Doncaster to allow people to alight, to which he replied it was a health and safety requirement for the bike to be upright. Looking back I don’t know why I didn’t just deal with the faff and remove all my panniers, but instead my solution was to remove only the front two orange bags, flip the tourer on its hind legs, then wedge the whole thing into the compartment until it could be wedged no more. The train guard returned, raised a bemused eyebrow at the spectacle in front of him, and concluded the situation was now safe and healthy enough for the remainder of our journey.
I took a welcome break from camping at my generous aunt Margaret’s house in York, whereby I took the opportunity to rest, refuel and sort out a few admin tasks relating my phone’s roaming, latter turning out to be more of a pain in the arse than I could ever have imagined. The next day I took a train to Eaglescliffe and rode the final few kilometres to our family home.
I expect to make various train journeys with my touring bike throughout the tour, whether these be a short hop under a mountain pass, or skipping an entire country when the clock starts running low on my 90 day Schengen area visa (sponsored by BREXIT means BREAKFAST), so it was good to get on the scoreboard during the UK mini tour, which was now complete.
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PHOTOS: UK mini-tour
The Cycling Brit 
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