Sometimes you get what you wished for

James says:

I can't very well go around extolling the virtues of the slow trip, traveling by bike and how you see all the little things you miss as you wizz past in the car without occasionally taking a spoon of my own medicine. Let me run you through the first few hours of our day.

Hour #1

This morning we left the land of a million stag bars, replete with plastic palm trees and neon signs advertising cheap booze and cheap women in roughly equally quantities. Our journey takes us now up the coast of England on our way to Edinburgh; we quickly left the seaside town of Whitley Bay only to replace it with non desrcript outer suburb after suburb along the coast, with even more non descript and often heavily polluted and industrial beaches. This is to be the backdrop for the first hours riding of the day.

Hour #2

I'm reminded that we are on the other side of the world and hence things are clearly upside down; in Melbourne, or any other town in Australia this would be Brighton, an affluent beach front suburb where the well-to-do live. We also rode along the river Tyne on our way into Newcastle as well and judging by the cranes, docks and light industry the affluent don't live there either, so perhaps there is another part to Newcastle we missed, or perhaps we would have been better off to give it a miss ?

Hour #3

After some 15 miles we broke free of the endless grey suburban streets and out into an open field with a windmill at its entrance, also a sign saying power station next to it. Jolly good show I though, we'll ride though a big wind farm on the coast, it was after all pushing a solid easterly all day. But no, instead the largest aluminum smelter and huge coal power-station all-in-one I've ever seen. So we wound our way through the middle of this aluminum making complex to hit the beach, long sand dunes.

Hour #4

Lunch - Eventually we did manage to get up enough momentum to break orbit and get out into the real countryside, after 4 hours. Everything was very nice after that, but I think I'll let Alex do the talking for that part.

The moral of the story is be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.

Alex says:

Frankly, the trip out of Whitley Bay was only good because it got us out of Whitley Bay. We had a little bit of nice coastal path, then got caught in the clutches of the suburbs of Blyth and the rest of the conurbation up that section of coast; not pretty and not interesting. Good only because it was mostly flat.




The highlight of the day was Warkworth Castle. You can see it from a fair distance away, and there's a fair amount of the keep that you can still get access to. There's also bits and pieces left in the outer ward, some of which is essentially underground, and combined with the maze-like qualities of the keep this made it an awesome venue for playing tag (not by us, by the kids visiting at the same time).

Our destination, Alnmouth, is a too-cute little village on a promontory - we got to it over a lovely little stone bridge. Our accommodation... deserves a separate post...