After a lovely afternoon and overnight stay with Beth in Liverpool, I headed home early Saturday morning to pack all my stuff for the Alps and generally get my shit together. I started well by leaving Liverpool without any of the toiletries or food I’d bought the day before. Smooth move dude…
All too soon it was time to say my last goodbyes and start my hols. Cross Country Trains mucked up right from the start by stopping the “direct” train to Bristol, at Birmingham. I was not best pleased. Amazingly I don’t think I went overboard on the packing this time since I coped with B’ham New Street very well; I made polite conversation about cycling with the coffee shop man in the new concourse whilst some other staff cleaned up the smashed glass front door… who knows what happened? Before I knew it I was on my way South again.
Dinner at Tom’s was a bizarre concoction of pork, random white fish, another fish in a bag, sweetcorn and baked beans. It didn’t taste any better than it sounds or looks.
After an awkward fight with the blinds (they were sooo not intuitive) I dived into my super snuggly sleeping bag to get some much needed kip.
Super efficient packing
"Meaty, fishy, mush"
Day 1 - Sunday
5 and a half hours after the blind fight my 0500 alarm zapped me into action. I was downstairs in a flash and chomping on toast not long after that. On this evidence alone I would consider myself a morning person. Sam Gam on the other hand definitely isn’t, which is why I was surprised when he called at 5:25 to let us know Henry’s bike had been stolen from his house whilst he was in the shower. Sods law someone broke in on the day we’re going on a cycling trip! At least he was awake to notice pretty quickly. It was a race against time for Henry and the police to scour the streets for his missing pedaling machine.
Since none of us had faith in Henry being reunited with his baby, we loaded Tom’s spare bike on to the car and dropped it off at Mat’s. As we arrived, word got through that the police had actually found someone trying to ride Henry’s bike up Gloucester road.
Unfortunately this was just the beginning, as formal statements needed to be taken and the forensics team took finger prints at his house to link the drunk suspect to the crime scene; all this caused them leave Bristol 6 hours after us, well behind schedule.
Our car reached the ferry in Dover in good time, arriving just over an hour before departure. 3rd car on and off ferry :D very handy.
We each gorged ourselves on a full English breakfast, which proved to be a bit of a lead weight in the stomach, and not a nice mixture when sea is quite rough. So much for “just a croissant”. We bobbed up onto the top deck to check out the view, but the haziness obscured France and we didn’t stay long as the wind was threatening to pull us overboard (or should it be push. I should have paid more attention in fluids). *Edit 29th June, I actually passed fluids with 40%... goodness only knows how that happened!
DJ Mowbs is in the car headlining for UOBCC French Alps Trip. I woke Sam up by stroking his face. It’s fun being a little bit creepy sometimes. All for a good cause though, speakers were required for top DJ tuneage.
I spotted a pair on the Hitch at a service station. They’d spent 3 days trying to get out of Calais! Clearly St Malo is the place to go for an epic hitch. I wished them luck, but couldn’t offer them a lift since there’s barely room for the 3 of us in the little polo. And we can’t even offer them roof space.
4 episodes of Breaking Bad down, the in car battery charger is a life safer.
Some time later, we arrived in Pourchery, concluding a very, very long car journey! No sooner had my head hit the pillow than I was out like a light. I couldn’t have cared less that I only had a single bed; it was perfect.