- 6900 km on the bike
While preparing the route for my first day of biking tomorrow I notice that the GPS has a problem with the power supply socket. Why do these things always happen just before I am going on a journey?
So I find myself at 10 pm on the eve of my new vacation opening the GPS casing and fixing the delicate electronics inside. By 11 pm the device is working properly again. Hopefully this was my only electronics glitch for this trip.
Next morning I set out under a leaden sky northwards into Germany. It is election time in Germany and loads of posters are up advertising a wide variety of political parties. The silliest ones are put up by the "The Left" party; on one ad they demand "wealth for everyone", a few yards on they demand "higher taxes on wealth" on another one. No wonder these guys are a bit loony; they are the remnants of the old commie regime which used to run East Germany for forty years. For myself I tend to call them the Left-Overs...
Compared to the Germany I remember from decades ago the country is in a desolate state; the roads, even here in the relatively affluent south, are abominable. For years now these roads are overdue for a complete refurbishment. But instead of the proper job these Krauts used to do thirty years ago, only patching up of the worst potholes is being done. That is all those flat out broke counties and cities can afford now that each and every single German citizen "ows" thirtyfivethousand Euros of National debt - and that sum is increasing daily.
I enjoy the ride in spite of the crumbling infrastructure. I have a break at Wolfach, a favourite pit stop of mine because it is a very underrated place.
An hour later I reach Baden-Baden, a town which is exactly the opposite of Wolfach; lots of overpriced real estate crawling with tourists, and full of wannabe rich and famous morons.
I arrive in the southern outskirts of Karlsruhe just in time for the rush-hour, but manage to get over the Rhine river bridge without too much delay.
Another hour later I am in the "Southern Wine Route" area of the Palatinate and stop the bike to phone around for a place to stay. When the third hotel in a row tells me that they are fully booked with weekend warriors, I begin to suspect that all those cars heading westwards out of Karlsruhe earlier this Friday afternoon may have been city slickers on their way to the waterholes of this splendid wine region instead of commuters on their way home.
Never mind, I just bike on for another half hour until I am out of the vineyard country and find some digs without a problem. The place is right next to a busy railroad line and trains run through every 10 minutes, but after all those miles I sleep like a rock in spite of the noise.
- 7450 km on the bike
Up at 7.45 am. Quick, hearty breakfast with three bread rolls and plenty of salami and cheese. By 9.30 am I am on the road. Onward through that glorious biker paradise, the virtually deserted Hunsrück mountains, and later through the Mosel river valley:
Later I bike through the Eifel mountains - of course I pass by the Nürburgring racetrack. It is fairly busy there today, obviously lots of bikers are taking the opportunity to race their steeds around the course on this sunny Saturday. However, that is no good for Tigger, so instead I head on towards the Belgian border. I pass Eben Emael another infamous place during WWII - but the weather is just too good to stop for a look at those underground fortifications.
Belgian roads are hardly any better than the German pothole tracks, but that is not entirely the same; Belgium has been flat broke for decades and the roads are this bad for as long as I can remember.
For all my non-European readers I can confirm that Belgium is a splendid example of that "Euro-Pudding" I love so much; like Switzerland it is a country with multiple languages. You might now say; "oh, what a brilliant thing having all these different cultures living happily together next to each other". Well, it works halfway in Switzerland, but traditionally it does not work very well in Belgium. I have entered the country near the town of Eupen. That place used to be German until the Belgians got it as a sort of reparation after the Great War. That does not stop these people here from still being entirely German and stubbornly refusing to rig any signposting other than in German. Their direct neighbours are Walloons, i. e. French-speaking Belgians. But that invisible border which is more clearly marked in the Belgian mind than the Iron curtain ever was in mine is just a few miles away; here the Dutch speaking Flemish people live, and not overly much love is lost between these two groups.
I give you just one example of how crazy life in this tiny country is; imagine you are entering Belgium on my route and you are heading for the beautiful city of Liège - at least that is the name you have to follow on the signposts while biking through the French speaking part of the country. Within the German speaking area the signposts direct you towards "Lüttich" - yes it is the same place, just the German name for it. Of course, once you cross that invisible line into the Dutch speaking part of the country you have to look out for signs towards "Luik" - and yes, that is still that same city. Unless you are aware that all three peoples insist on their own naming conventions and unless you know that those three names always mean the same city you will never find the place (except of course if you use a GPS, that is). You can only hope not to have to converse with any of the older Walloon people - they usually call that town "Lidje"...
My route is leading me right along the language border and at least a dozen times the signs switch languages. A word of warning is also in order about the Belgian car drivers; statistically they are the worst drivers in Western Europe. That is understandable because the country is so flat that the majority of them has never encountered a curve. Add to that the fact that until not so long ago any driver passing his driving license for cars automatically and without any further test had the one for heavy motorbikes included as well. So you probably do understand why insurance premiums in Belgium are the highest in all of Europe.
A profound improvement if compared to France are the Belgian petrol stations; like in France they all close on Saturday at noon for the weekend, but other than in France foreign credit cards are accepted on most of the automated pumps.
I end the day after just over 400 km about 20 km south of Brussels at some dingy hotel south of Overijse - simply because I forgot what the country code of Belgium is for telephone calls. Given that I do this kind of biking for decades now, this oversight in my preparations is quite annoying. Normally I just pick a hotel from the list in my GPS and call them. You can uaually make an educated guess about the quality of the place from the number of stars they have, the facilities they offer or simply by the money they ask for a room. But as I have forgotten to make a note of the dialling code of Belgium I end up just driving to the nearest hotel on my GPS at 5.30 pm and check in for the night. The place is fairly grotty by my standards, but the food is acceptable and all I need after eight hours of biking is a decent diner and a pillow to put my head down on.
- 7850 km on the bike
The alarm gets me up at 7.30 am. I have a boat to catch today and it is over 200 km of country roads to the port of Dunkerque in France. The trip is quite enjoyable and for the third day in a row the weather is playing along; though hazy most of the time it is dry and with about 20 degrees Celsius quite nice to bike.
The coast around Dunkerque is one of the grimmest stretches of those thousands of kilometres of French coastline. The famous dunes are not bad, but the main feature of Dunkerque are its steel mills and chemical plants which have been built right on the coast to be in close proximity of the harbour.
At the port three other bikes are already waiting for the boat - and one of them is a silver Triumph Tiger 955. The biker belonging to this timeless classic has just bought her a few weeks ago with 15000 miles on the clock - she is hardly broken in from my point of view. We exchange some views on the new Tiger vs. the old. His needs a lot of oil - she is a 2005 model, probably one where Triumph fitted those bad oil rings on the pistons, they had a bad batch from a supplier, so it is a known gremlin. With this entertaining company the half hour until the boat is ready for boarding flies by.
As the good old pirates from Speedferries went bust a couple of month ago I had to look for another carrier to get me across the English Channel. I have chosen Norfolk Line, mainly because they offer a first class lounge for a moderate surcharge where the usual riff-raff and lager-louts as well as children are not allowed in - what a difference it makes to be away from the maddening crowds, fast food smells and crying toddlers. It is getting more and more obvious that advancing age is turning me into a snobbish old fart instead of the sexy senior citizen I had hoped for...
Yesterday evening I watched some Eco-magazine on TV in the hotel. They reported on the vast amount of plastic garbage and other waste that is discharged into the seas of the planet. On board the Maersk Dover, the ferry that brings me and Tigger to England, there is a placard listing what types of dumping at sea is currently legal:
Did you know that? I certainly did not. Even if the skipper of a ship full of waste adheres to those rules he should not find it too difficult to dump his load quite legally in most European waters.
At 3 pm local time the ferry docks at Dover.
Many years ago I bought an entire set of road maps of England at a car boot sale, complete with a leather satchel to carry them and a handy index sheet - issued in 1937. I just bought them for fun, but soon realized that I had come across a real treasure; most European countries began widening their existing road network and construction of a motorway network shortly after the Second World War. Except of course the United Kingdom. By the time the government in London woke up in the early 1960's they deemed the country so far behind the rest of Europe that a widening scheme of the existing roads was not enough. So a completely new grid of A-roads, trunk roads and motorways was built. The existing network of medieval tracks and byways however was left perfectly intact. So the roads on my 1937 map set were basically still intact and the roads just the same as they were when T. E. Lawrence biked them on his Brough Superior.
If you follow my route on the map you will see that I am biking through the South of England mainly on this type of byway, commonly called Single Track Roads.
I would not recommend them to any newbie biker and also not for experienced bikers from the continent unless you have significant experience with driving on the left side of the road. For me of course that kind of biking comes natural and I zip along the hedges of those roads as if had never done any other biking in my life.
After another two hours of glorious biking I call it a day and phone the Premier Inn at Wateringbury near Maidstone - alas, I know the country dialling code for the UK out of the back of my head.
The lodgings are decent, the village is quiet and I now have time to set my kit to English time. I realise that even for a brief shopping trip like this there is lot of kit to adjust; my mobile phone, my camera, the clock on Tigger, the GPS and finally my laptop - how did I ever manage to ride a bike in those dark and ancient times when I did not have all these electronic gizmos? Even more; how did one book accommodation, take snapshots, find that accommodation or keep a diary? Oh, yes, now I remember from the deep pit of a lifetime of memories: there were so-called public phones in those days. Most of my younger readers have probably never seen one in real life. The most fascinating feature about them from todays point of view is that these things were built (as the name implies) in public places, and one could expect them to be around for a significant longer time than those eleven minutes it would take nowadays before they'd get vandalised by some mindless juvenile moron.
And I had a camera, an SLR loaded with film rolls. Given that each time you'd hit that picture button on it would set you back a fair amount of money until you had the printed results in hand, made you think twice before you operated that shutter. I remember coming back from a five-week bike ride through the Middle East in 1998 having taken less than 100 pictures. My current camera can take more than 10000 pictures or record six hours of full HD video on a memory chip smaller than a fingernail, costing about as much as a single roll of film did twenty years ago...
And I kept my diary in a neat black paper-notebook using a pen. Thinking of which, I still have quite a number of those black notebooks at home, full of bike rides not yet available online. One day I will have a go through them and put them on the web...
- 8200 km on the bike
Next morning I continue my ride through the shires and counties of Southern England. My destination, as usual when on a shopping trip to England, is West Berkshire, Northern Hampshire and parts of Wiltshire and Oxfordshire. These places are highly underrated; most tourists will go either to London or further out West to Devon or Cornwall. West Berkshire and its neighbours are not spots known for tourist attractions, but have all the trimmings of rural England without the hassle of droves of tourists.
During the next four days I do go shopping for all those goodies essential for civilisation as we know it, though unavailable in continental Europe.
On my second day I head for downtown London - though not for taking pictures. My website does not have any means of controlling the age of its visitors. So if you are an underage kid looking for an explanation of what mummy and daddy are doing at night or, more to the point, what uncle Billy is doing with aunt John, then this is not the place you are going to find the answer.
Day three sees me heading for Andover, precisely the workshops of Acumen Electronics. The guys who run this company mostly used to work for Datatool - which is another way of saying that they were formerly the brains of Datatool. I buy a digital gear indicator, because I always tend to look for seventh gear on my bike when riding it. I had one on my old Kitty and I firmly believe that any modern bike should have one as standard. In addition I get myself all the kit necessary to transform the weak lighting system of my Tigger to a modern gas-discharge system (details of the conversion can be found here), about five times brighter than the tired single H7 bulb can muster at present.
Here are some snapshots for you so that you have an idea about the kind of countryside to expect when biking this part of the world:
With such rides and such sights those three full days I have in England pass rapidly - especially given the fact that I have some shopping and other "errands" to do.
- 9000 km on the bike
On Friday I have to ride back. For the journey I basically do a variation of my outward journey, though always a couple of miles from my outward track. Here are some more pictures I took in Belgium:
After highly delightful 3300 km I am back in Switzerland 10 days after setting out on this little trip.
- 10200 km on the bike
Below is the usual map with my GPS tracklog.