It’s been unusually (and for Rett, uncomfortably) warm ever since we arrived in the UK, but now another proper 2-day heat wave is coming that cranks the dial up from highs in the low-to-mid 80s to the low-to-mid 90s. We didn’t want to be riding through those conditions, but also escaping the heat is difficult… Read more…

The main reason we selected a motorway Travelodge as our overnight accommodation was its proximity to Castle Combe. This is a medieval village (which doesn’t actually have a castle) that Rett found in her scan of the region of interesting places for us to visit. Our hotel location would make it easy to pass through… Read more…

Our alarm went off four hours later than yesterday morning’s, but that was still 7am, and felt pretty early. We weren’t actually in any rush to get anywhere, but with sunrise before 6am, it was time to really get our bodies onto a “bike touring” daylight-based schedule, and I didn’t want to “waste” the rude… Read more…

Our real target for autumn is not England, but France and parts south; we expect to do our main exploration of the UK next summer. So essentially we’re just spending a month or so in England “killing time”, waiting to start our 90-day Schengen visa clock. The Queen Mary 2 landed us in Southampton, which… Read more…

It’s time to begin learning what cycling the UK is like. It can be a lengthy process in a new country, requiring exposure to different roads, cyclepaths, and traffic types, observing the behavior of other cyclists and drivers to learn what is culturally acceptable, all while regaining comfort with cycling on the “wrong” side of… Read more…

The Queen Mary 2 arrived to Southampton while we slept, so waking up and looking over our balcony rail this morning showed a bunch of ugly port infrastructure, quite a change from a week of seeing nothing but open ocean (also, I could see the large luggage carts stacked with peoples’ checked baggage being forklifted… Read more…