Reflections on being a cyclist

Nomenclature
I think I can claim to be a cyclist now. That may seem a weird thing to think about, but it's like when I started running: at what point can you claim to be a runner? Anyway, I figure 1600 or so miles in three months is enough to claim being a cyclist.

I cannot imagine having done this trip on any bike other than Argo. I named it (her!) The Argo after the ship which carried Jason and his fellow ruffians - sorry, heroes - on their trip to steal - sorry, find and retrieve - the Golden Fleece. In some of the legends the Argo is attributed some sort of sentience, helping keep the Greek toughies out of some trouble. I figured this was a good name for a bike that would be taking me on (to be a little cliched here) the journey of a lifetime; while I'm not planning on stealing a national treasure (and let's not talk about Medea), I was rather hoping she would keep me out of trouble along the way. And yes, I do have a tendency to anthropomorphise objects; spending such a huge amount of time with it seemed to make naming the bike a good idea. It also allows for some displacement activity when negotiating particularly hairy sections of track; plus, how else could she Twitter?

Built by Baum, Argo is over-engineered for anything other than a trip like this. I know I'm meant to like the gears because they're hub-gears, etc etc; I just like that they allow me to ride (slowly) up inclines of 10% or so. And I know I'm meant to like the brakes because they're hydraulic disk brakes; I just like them because they allow me to ride (slowly) down inclines of 20% or so with my main terror being that I'll fall off if I grip them too hard. And I love the loopy handle bars because they're more comfortable, and they look different.

Experience
Being a cyclist is a remarkably sociable activity. Out riding, I can almost remember the number of fellow-cyclists who haven't said hello to us; and most of them were chavs (bogans) out cruising because their other wheels got taken away from them. And most of the time pedestrians - when you're out on the real cycling trails - also say hello. Frankly, it makes being a pedestrian again, especially in towns, really weird: you no longer stand out, you're no longer exceptional, because you don't look any different from anyone else. We've passed a lot of fellow cycle tourists, but we're still something of an oddity for most people in this country, which makes people pay attention. Actually, I think we finished the cycling at the right time, because I was just starting to get the urge to pull faces at people when they stared at me and Argo - especially when we were puffing up hills.

Being a cyclist also makes you remarkably non-scary. Arriving by bike almost always starts a conversation at lunch time, and especially at our accommodation. Opening our traps in bars and pubs, revealing ourselves as Aussies, often starts a conversation too - but add in the bit about the bicycles and all of a sudden people are interested in chatting, finding out why we're so crazy and where we're going. You don't necessarily get that sort of reaction when you're traveling by car - I guess because you're not that unusual.

Sadly, sometimes it bites to be a girl cyclist. For example, let's imagine a day of riding oh, say 30 miles. You have to drink a lot to keep from dehydrating. You have lunch on the trail - maybe 2-minute noodles. And you don't pass a single public toilet for the entire day...

Inevitabilities
Despite what I drummed into my Yr12 students, some things really are inevitable.

If I put on sunscreen, it will rain.
If I take off my rain jacket, it will rain. (And sometimes, vice versa.)
When I am puffing up a hill, gasping for air, then will the greatest concentration of insects in the shire appear.
Whenever I encounter a descent, there will be an opposite - and frequently unequal - ascent in the near future.
The quantity of cream in a Lunchtime Bakery Treat is directly proportional to how long and/or steep the hill will be within a mile of the lunch stop.

In the end...
I've enjoyed being a cyclist. It was of course a very different experience for me - I am not really all that comfortable as a tourist, but at least on the bike I got to feel like I was genuinely experiencing the country, at least to some extent.

Will I now be a 'real' cyclist when I get home? Insofar as cycling to uni, sure; and around Melbourne a bit, absolutely. I'm keeping Argo as my normal bike; no way am I giving up those gears. But will I be out racing with the lycra loonies on their road bikes? Hell no.

Thank yous, acceptance speech, etc

Dear Mum
I hope you can sleep better now that we're not on our bikes riding around like crazy things.

Dear Justin
I hope you have stopped frantically refreshing this blog now that we have indeed completed our circuit.

Dear Gillian
I'm not sure whether this trip will have turned me into a 'real' cyclist. I still hate the idea of riding a road bike, I hate drafting, and I think Argo on Beach Rd with all those nutters would be... interesting.

Dear Dave
Although we've stopped riding, I'm going to make James come running with me now. So I hope you're upping your training for the Degani.

Dear Kate, Tansy, and everyone else who thought this was a nutty idea
I hope you're happy now that we've stopped riding and are back to being slightly more sensibly tourists.

Dear Tansy (again)
Thanks (again) for setting up the LiveJournal feed for us. I'm sure the seven subscribers appreciated it ;)

Dear Bron (and Mike)
Does the map make you happy? Turns out it was a very good idea after all! :D

Dear Kathryn
You did such a good job giving us ideas for Edinburgh, got any suggestions for London?

Dear Kim
Sorry we haven't given you any more opportunities for snarky comments. I do hope Tennant F Creek is treating you well.

Dear Wilski (and Gina)
We'll be home soon(ish) for pizza and brewskis. Promise.

Dear everyone who read but did not comment
...

The End

1610 miles (2592km) and we return back to where we started. The final stretch of riding from Hathersage was comfortingly familiar, between a few days walking out here and a ride almost to Hathersage when we first arrived in the UK 3 months ago we'd been on most of the roads we would need to travel today. A hard 3 mile climb to wake up the legs and get up and out of the town and over the ridge into Sheffield starts the day, after that it's just downhill through the farms, and then parks right into Sheffield we were are back to staying with Martin and Liz for a bit.

Rolling up their back driveway was quite a different feeling to the one we had leaving in the rain with our bikes a bit overloaded with books and so-on. We'll follow up with a few more posts on the best places to see, some of the things that worked well for us etc, but expect less regular updates as we just play at being tourists now for a bit before we come home. Sheffield, some more time in the Peaks, Cambridge and London are the main agenda from here.

So thank you loyal readers for following the adventures of Henry and the Argo around this small island, we apologize for the lack of calamity in the last few weeks, I can assure you that we thrive on our misadventure just as much as you do. It feels like a good TV soap opera where all the story lines get a bit weak at the end before the network cans the show.

On a happy, and yet bitter-about-all-the-things-I-carried-and-didn't-need note neither of us had a single mechanical problem on the entire trip, not even a flat tire. The Joe's No-Flats solution seems to work well, I stopped even bothering to pump up our tires for the last 6 weeks, they just weren't loosing any air.

Henry and the Argo would like to give their thanks too, but we already took them apart and stuffed them back into boxes.

The Peaks are beautiful

As James said, the Peaks District really is beautiful. The ride to Hathersage included scenes like this:

and like this:

Bakewell was disappointing, both because of the number of people and the disappointing lunch we had. However, Hathersage is much more interesting, especially for James because it's got three outdoors stores. Today, we went for a walk along Stanage Edge. We've been along here before, but not in the same direction. The views included this:

and this:

Impressive, no? And we managed not to get rained on, which was delightful. It was a good, three-hour walk - up hill and down dale, through a nice variety of landscapes. And the rest of the day... well, quite restful, really.

Stalled

The more observant of our dear readers will have noticed that the two ends of our circuit appear to have met, but of course you also zoomed in abit to find out that we appear to have stalled just outside the gates of Sheffield. This is true. We've put up in the little village of Hathersage for a couple of days before we finally complete our circuit tomorrow.

Riding over to here from Hartington was spectacular, particularly the long descent into Bakewell with villages and farms visible in all directions... I do believe Alex might even upload some photos of it later. The second section after lunch was not quite so spectacular, a long 10 miles section on a hilly B road which the public had seen fit to drive up and down constantly. Anyway we survived. A long walk in the hills today and then we'll pack our bikes up one more time to finish our lap !

And then there was Hartington

Derby to Hartington (yesterday): 33 miles

We escaped Derby and eventually made our way into the Derbyshire Dales, which is basically part of the Peaks District.



We did this on a Sunday, a very sunny Sunday, and like our entrance into Whitby waaay back in May, we rode into a traffic jam in Ashbourne. Ashbourne is a fairly cute little market town, with lots of antique shops. It seems to be The Place where people come on sunny Sundays - maybe take Grandma out for a jaunt, maybe eat an ice cream, maybe ride or walk sloooowly along the cycle track that other people also want to use.


Other things we had to negotiate on our way. Fortunately, we were going in the opposite direction... unlike quite a line of cars...

We got to Hartington mid-afternoon, and it too was crawling with people eating ice cream and sitting outside baking in the sun.

Fast forward to Monday, and we woke up to the sound of rain. Which continued on and off for the entire day; no sunscreen required today. Only a little deterred, we ventured out into the Dales for a walk that ended up being a fair bit longer than we expected; it took about two hours to do a circuit that included the site of a Norman motte and bailey castle (all that's left is the motte, or earth mound) and a remarkable number of sheep pastures. Also waterlogged shoes.

However, it was very pretty, as promised by James' cousin on whose recommendation we are here.


Additionally, our B&B is probably winning in the breakfast stakes. My porridge was so good, it probably had something illegal in it.

The West Midlands: from Oxford to Derby

Stopping at: Winslow, Castlethorpe, Market Harborough, Cropston and Derby.

The Midlands. What is there to say? There was a lot of this:



and this:



BORING. Flat, and boring. It finally got more interesting yesterday, but seriously this is the most boring area of England - of Britain - scenery-wise that we have ridden through so far. Meh.

Perhaps the only interesting bits of the last few days (all about 30 miles or a bit more, for those keeping track) have been the towns we've ridden through - and how they compare with our expectations. Milton Keynes, as the prime example: we had expected it to be utterly, utterly dire: the middle of nowhere and a real nowhere town. However, almost because of being the middle of nowhere it seems to be the middle of everywhere - you can get to a lot of interesting places very quickly from there. Also, I don't know how but they have an amazing green belt, following a series of streams and canals; and fortunately for us the bike path followed through that belt. So it was a really lovely ride, and we saw more canal boats in that area than I have ever seen in one place before. Northampton and Leicester, though: both awful.

Of Leicester, let me tell you one story. As we entered the town, we rode along this trail:


If you look very carefully, you will see that every single pole has a white blob. Those blobs looked like this:

front and back.

For more than a mile, every pole we passed - left and right - had a wraparound sticker, identifying it as Route 6. Let me be clear: there were no turns along this path. None.

And then (I do hope you are all aware enough of narrative techniques that you knew there had to be an 'and then' coming up), just on the outskirts of Leicester - near the National Space Centre which we ignored despite the Soyez because it was too expensive - there were a series of turns and not-necessarily-that-tricky sections... which had no stickers or signs.

Gargh!

Anyway - we are now in Derby, which as far as I can tell is well on the way to being the Paisley of the South. Good thing our accommodation is lovely and has a selection of DVDs. Tomorrow we hit the Peaks district, which will at least be prettier, if also hillier.

We are not dead

We are however in the midlands, so nothing at all exciting has happened for a few days. Unless you count getting a bit lost and having to ride along a canal for a few miles one day, or riding through a long (450m) unlit tunnel using our wimpy little dynamo lights which stop if we stop. We'll be back in the peaks in a few days, we promise some more pictures and stuff then !

What's so great about Oxford ?

Oxford for all the apparent romance of this center for learning isn't really a very nice place. It's full of cars, rusty bicycles and worst of all students. But all is not lost, it has some redeeming features, the fabulous Blackwells Bookstore an excellent Sushi train and two very special museums.

The first is the Natural History Museum - it's taken me three visits over 3 years to understand what's so special about this place. It's not the biggest natural history museum I've been in, it's not the smartest either, most of the collection here is simply presented in identical wooden framed glass cases about 12 feet high and 12 feet wide. What is special is that by just walking around balcony of geological and fossil specimens, by walking up and down the rows of glass cabinets filled with stuffed specimens and dinosaur skeletons you journey through the entire natural history timeline of our world much like speed reading Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' but with much better pictures.





The second is the Museum of the History of Science - 3 floors of working scientific instruments carefully organized again into large wooden framed glass cabinets. One of the earliest flasks of Penicillin, Marconi's experiments with radio waves and electricity and so on and so on, it's all the instruments used to conduct all the experiments you (ok perhaps mostly me) read about as a child, in school science through university physics and chemistry. It's not pretentious, a cabinet might contain 100 microscopes, but only the most eye catching or historically significant two or three will even be given a label. It's beautiful and inspiring without being overwhelming.

Birmingham

My mother is currently in the UK indulging her inner cricket tragic; she was at the Lord's test, and is now attending the Edgbaston test. We arranged our itinerary to be within easy train distance of Birmingham, with the idea of stealing her away from a day of the cricket.



Fortunately, it rained all day, so she didn't actually miss any cricket! And, from what I've heard, it's a good thing for the Aussies that it rained all day....

When we met Mum in the foyer of her hotel, she was surrounded by bananas: the Banana Army, who - upon seeing that little cricket was likely to be had for the day - decided to start in on one-pint-in-each-hand at 11am. Classy.

Aside from talking, and getting rained on, and making snarky comments about the feralness of Birmingham, we actually did manage to see some stuff. First off, the Pen Rooms. Set up in a former pen factory - don't laugh, at one stage three quarters of the world's writing instruments were manufactured in Birmingham, almost entirely by women - it's two rooms stuffed to the gills with writing paraphernalia. Most of it pen nibs of the most amazing variety, including a set with 5 nibs for drawing a musical stave! And they still have some of the machinery used, which I got to have a go at: they're all fly presses, which means that once your piece of metal is in the right spot you give a big weight a mighty heave - and the blank is pressed, or it gets embossed, or the metal gets curved... it was an incredibly labour-intensive process, and the woman in charge of pressing out blanks, for example, was expected to cut 28,000 in one day in order to make a decent living.

From the mundane to the sublime: next we went to the Museum of the Jewellery Quarter. The Jewellery Quarter was a really important area of manufacturing, way back when; these days it's almost exclusively retail, and the jewellery is imported. But the museum is set up in the workshop of Smith and Pepper: a company founded by an uncle/nephew team, continued by three of the nephew's children... who then, in August 1981, walked out and closed the door. Nine years later, the Birmingham Council got around to doing something about it. We went on a tour around the offices and workshops, and they were just fascinating. Again, so labour-intensive; also, OHS was unheard of - fly-wheels and acid fumes and blow-torches...

These two museums meet our criteria for 'free' and 'awesome.'

The rest of the day involved getting rained on, sitting, drinking beer, eating Indian, and then catching the last train back to Oxford (fortunately sans rowdy cricket fans).