Where We're Going ... We Don't Need Roads

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...Or don't have them at all.


It started out well. We left the rental house in Peckham at around 7:45am and zipped around busy London streets. We passed Battersea and Wembley and through Hyde Park, darting between buses and riding along side hurried commuters also on two wheels. Then everything went wrong.


We came to the Thames and spend most of the day riding along side canals with pathways made out of loose gravel and sharp stones. All of these paths are designated bike paths but surely not for road bikes. Some paths were 18 inches wide of packed dirt surrounded by grass and nettles. Got through Slough and had lunch in Reading and started back out again. At this point we had cycled over 50 miles and 70 percent of it had been without roads. There were also stairs!!!



With my left knee aching and my arms sore from gripping the handlebars over uncertain terrain I hit a patch of lose stones and lost control running into a fence and falling to the ground, popping the back of Monster Munch snacks I had in my backpack.
We swore off any gravel roads at this point.







We redirected to the A4, a busier road but with one lane on each side. This we took all the way to the famous downs that inspired Richard Adams novel Watership Down. Problem is we had to climb all the way to the top. The last hill provided too difficult so we walked the bikes up to find our road crew in Snail 1 at the top.





We were encouraged to cut our days journey short at this point. We still had over 30 miles to go but the journey thus far had taken far longer than anticipated. We were frequently slowed to 6 or 7 miles an hour over the rough, loose surfaces we had endured and we would have been cycling long after dark had we not called it a day. Demoralized, we made our way to the hotel.

Two of our father's former colleagues met us at the hotel bar in Salisbury, Ashraf Alam and Stephen Dugdale. (Sorry to miss Paul Coleman, we wish him a speedy recovery). Ashraf was our father's first graduate student and Stephen was Ashraf's.  Stephen claims this made our dad his grand supervisor. I hadn't seen either one since the mid 90's so it was great to see them again. I appreciated that they drove so far, into potentially poisonous territory, and then had to wait for us longer than anticipated. We talked a little about what we had encountered our first day. Ashraf said that it didn't make a difference whether we did the same miles as dad did, but that we were doing it to honor him. I felt a little better.

Some serious inspection of the next day's path ensued in the room later on. I'm not sure what we will encounter tomorrow. I'm not sure how my knee will feel but we will keep trying.

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