This was another of those “what it’s all about” bike tour days.
I had been to London before, by emerging from the train and then eventually boarding an international flight, but I’d never been out in the English countryside. Now we had an entire day ahead of just riding, and it was almost exactly the summer solstice, and our destination was Canterbury. The stage was set for an amazing journey.
Packing for our first day up and away from the coast.
It’s a bit disorienting being in the country that spawned Alice In Wonderland, and seeing the version of the Cheshire Cat popularized by that weird American movie from 2010. American cinema has quite the global reach.
This will slightly reduce the bruising you get when you collide with this stanchion at speed.
Once breakfast and coffee were in us, we began zig-zagging upwards to the start of national cycle trail number 17, which led due north towards Canterbury and promised relatively quiet but paved roads all the way.
And it delivered! Though I must admit the first mile, starting around The Church Of St. Nicholas, was pretty steep going. It had to route around an enormous train station that connected to the Eurotunnel line.
A little ways down the road we found a nifty museum and souvenir shop, and stopped to poke around. Plenty of daylight, and only about 25 miles to cover, with no big hills. Why not linger?
We were consistently off the main roads, and cars were so rare that it was easy to imagine I was riding through the countryside in an era where cars weren’t even a thing yet, and the most likely vehicle I would encounter was a hay wagon, and no one went any faster than about 15 miles an hour unless they were on a train or a good horse. Of course that was silly because the roads were quite modern, but in my mind it was an alternate history where this wasn’t a paradox.
I set aside the fine condition of the road, and just absorbed the scenery, along with the sounds of animals and the smell of the fields and trees. One hill merged gently into another, and as I turned the pedals the sight-lines churned with a languid procession of hedgerows, glowing pastures, ivy-draped wooden fences, weathered stone walls, and irregular patches of cropland. Occasionally everything narrowed down to a tunnel of deep green foliage, streaked with sun, then opened out again, as though I was entering a new chapter in a story.
An hour or so into this, I got a specific feeling that I sometimes get on these journeys, on days like this one. For long moments I felt like I was alive and experiencing my environment just like usual, except I had been ripped entirely out of regular time and space. It’s similar to that feeling you get when you’re dreaming and you realize you’re in a dream: You start looking around in disbelief because things feel deceptively real. At the same time, there’s a complete break – a discontinuity – with your regular life. In fact, it’s so complete that you’re not even sure your regular life is actually a thing. It’s on the other side of the looking glass and no matter how deeply you stare into it, you just see more of where you are. It’s not exactly frightening, because you don’t mind being here. But it is exceedingly confusing.
I had seen the English countryside in films, pictures, paintings — even imagined it as I read history and fantasy in countless books. Now I was inside them all. This is where Chaucer’s pilgrims walked. This is more or less what real people saw and smelled here a thousand years ago. What life — whose life — am I living just now? Or, how many?
I paused a few times and just stared at the trees, or leaned on the bike and closed my eyes and listened. What a gorgeous summer day. One of millions here, and the first one of mine.
The sheep taunted me as I pedaled, so I taunted them back!
To my secret amusement I realized I was riding on “Pett Bottom Road” past “Gorsley Wood”, and had just passed a tavern called “The Duck.” Cute names make any geography better.
Nick was still riding ahead of me and already in the downtown, but I stopped at the edge of Canterbury to check out St Martin’s Church, the oldest existing parish church in the English-speaking world.
St Martin’s Church is not only the oldest church in England, it’s the oldest complete standing building in England. It incorporates a structure from Roman times into its walls, and has been kept in reasonable repair for over 1500 years while adapted for various uses.
I checked us in at the hotel – a dank and slightly sinister place called Greyfriars that I found quite charming – and we rode out in pursuit of dinner.
If falling masonry was reason to close this place, it should have been closed several hundred years ago…
It’s so magnificent that as soon as you see it a tour of the interior becomes a mandatory event in your future. It’s undeniable. We decided to wait a few days until Andrew was with us.
The city streets empty out at night, and the place becomes proper spooky. We had a good time drifting around them on two wheels.
It was pretty late when we returned to the hotel, which was perfect because I wanted to carry the bikes inside and I didn’t want the manager to hassle me about it. Recumbents can be awkward to move, but with these you can actually tilt them straight up and grab them around the seat, which lets you hold them very close to your body. Perfect for negotiating dank and sinister staircases covered in precious woodwork that you don’t want to gouge with a sprocket.
An amazing cross-country day, and now there was a legendary city to explore! Hooray for bike tours!
We’ve been playing it fast and loose with the schedule, so we’d been fast and loose with the hotel bookings. I’d booked us a place south of Dover as soon as we got off the boat. Often there’s little downside to this when you’re in a touristy region with a lot of churn because rooms spontaneously open up. This time the power of databases failed us.
When I walked into our hotel lobby, a customer was having a heated argument with the guy behind the counter. She said she already paid for a room, but the guy insisted the room didn’t exist: According to him the booking service had been double-booking his rooms.
“People have been arriving all day to take rooms that somebody else is in!” he groused. “I’ve called them and mailed them to make it stop, and they tell me nothing!”
She was unimpressed by this explanation, and said so. Meanwhile, her husband was out on the front steps, looking for another room with his phone. Instead of using some specialized app he was calling hotels, one by one, and asking if they had a vacancy. He was done trusting databases for the night.
Just then, another guy came downstairs in a big hurry, slammed the keys to room number three on the desk and said “I have an urgent call. I need to leave immediately!”
The customer looked at the keys and said “How about if we take that room?”
The manager reluctantly agreed and said “I’ll go up and see if it’s clean.”
While he was upstairs, the customer wandered outside to check in with her husband, who had just finished booking a room at another hotel about a mile away. The three of us complained together about how insane it was that the hotel couldn’t prevent its own double-bookings. I pointed at the bicycles and said, “We came here on bikes! Now we’re going to have to ride all the way up the hill to the campground to find a place to stay.”
The manager came downstairs and declared “The room looks fine.”
Instead of taking it, the customer turned to me and said, “Hey, we have a room booked already and we can get a refund from here. Why don’t you take that room instead?”
And thus was the bacon of Nick and myself saved.
The manager called a taxi for the customer and her husband, and Nick and I moved a bunch of bags up into the room. I had already paid for an adjacent room that was currently occupied, and the cost was the same so there was no additional charge. As I signed the standard paperwork I chatted with the manager, and learned that he had purchased the hotel 51 years ago and rebuilt it from the ground up. He’s from the Canary Islands and has been taking groups of school kids from there on group outings to major cities across Europe for 37 years, with transportation and interpreters, as a way to enrich the community he’s from. He showed me a brochure with pride, and the prices looked very reasonable.
When he heard we were from California he said, “I’ve taken a bunch of vacations to there! It’s one of the most beautiful places in the world!” That’s quite an endorsement from someone who grew up on the Canary Islands.
“Hey, you know what? For the trouble, the next time you come through here you can stay for free.”
“That’s really nice of you! Although, it might not be for a long time. We don’t get to ride much and there’s a lot of amazing country to see here.”
He shrugged and said “I already done 50 years here. I can wait a bit.”
As an introvert, I felt deeply uncomfortable for the first week in Paris. I arrived in an introverted state of mind, desiring solitude, and a chance to sit down and work and think quietly, perhaps in some nice green spaces. Paris laughed at that.
Any time of day or night when I went outside, I saw throngs of people walking around and sitting at tables conversing with each other. Every night, even at the grand hour of 3:00am, the river near my apartment was thickly lined with people, most of them young, some of them eating food, some sitting on chairs or couches hauled to the edge of the street, all of them talking. The crowds waxed and waned, but they never, ever went away.
It was constant and eternal, the conversation. I was not used to the physical closeness of the seated crowds. The equivalent closeness back home would be at a ballgame, or a concert, or some other collective activity. We were packed close, and if you weren’t talking, you were the odd one out. Almost no one sat alone.
Back home I could enter a coffee shop with plenty of space to sit down, and be completely undisturbed as I sat among other people, most of them working on things or reading quietly, with the occasional conversation happening in between. I would have room to spread out papers, or a laptop next to a plate. Often there would be music filling out the atmosphere. I found almost no recorded music playing in Paris. Because, why bother? The talking would just drown it out. It was like the busiest part of a thriving downtown, reproduced around itself, spiraling outward to the size of an entire city. There was no place you could go, outdoors or in, aside from your own home, that wasn’t in line of sight from at least one other person, and usually a crowd.
I don’t know whether my initial discomfort with this was because I am an introvert most of the time, or because I couldn’t speak very much French, and felt isolated due to that. But one thing that only occurred to me in retrospect is that I was witnessing a version of urban life imbued with so much energy that it actually squeezed out the presence of the smartphone, and the internet in general. There was so much audible conversation vibrating in the air that the wireless signals now permeating everything were superfluous. I’m certain the people here have cell phones in just the same quantity as any other modern city, but I saw them far less than back home. When people sat down at a table, they conversed with the person across from them, and almost never pulled out their phone, except perhaps to check something germane to the conversation. Why be concerned about information and dialogue happening miles away when there is so much directly in front of your face, pushing into your ears?
This is about an hour of waiting in line for a few scoops of ice cream. I’m sure it’s tasty but, I’m going to go with a different vendor, thanks…
I arrived here by train, and I imagine almost all the other tourists either did the same or arrived by the airport, which means the impression we’re building of France is confined to this city. The rest of France, and French people in general, could be wildly different. I get that. But I can say this about Paris: Nowhere else have I seen such a combination of narrow streets, packed bars, tiny tables decorated with “no laptop” signs, public parks so covered in people that the green of the grass is drowned out by the colors of clothing and skin and food, self-assured pedestrians striding out into traffic, bicycles and scooters barreling through narrow corridors cut into throngs of people, and gawking tourists with sunburns and sore feet. I’ve seen this stuff in other European cities, including large ones like London and Copenhagen, and bicycle-mad places like Amsterdam, but not to this manic degree. Not to the point where it feels like an expression of something fundamentally different beneath. The city feels ripped out of modern time, existing in a space where things invented this century are treated as a suspicious, uncool intrusions. Especially things that create metaphysical distance between people, like the smartphone.
Maybe I’m reading too much into this. But I imagine someone living in Paris would find practically every other city in the western world to be lonely by comparison. Even though there is a language barrier for me, the press of constant dialogue and the sense of being insulated from all of the change and chaos of the outside world by the buffering chaos of the city itself is weirdly reassuring, as though I’m experiencing a unique synthesis of being anonymous in a crowd while also being intimately close to everyone here with me.
There’s a beautiful little park here, somewhere, under all these people.
On the other hand, how intimate is it, really? Americans are known for being very gregarious in public encounters, even with strangers, telling them all kinds of personal details about their lives, to the point where many foreigners feel like their privacy is being grossly invaded during the average subway ride or transaction at a supermarket. And I suspect that reaction would be the same even for a Parisian wandering around New York. I think they would feel hesitant, and the funny, scrappy, slightly pugilistic dialogue that’s been the baseline of my random exchanges in New York or Chicago would probably feel uncomfortably aggressive to them.
And if you took a million Americans and crammed them together in a city as close as Paris, would we all sit alone at tiny tables on the street hunched over our cell phones, too afraid – or too overworked – to talk to one another in this way? Or would we would blossom into our own American kind of dialogue?
Actually I suspect most of us would immediately feel hemmed in by the lack of space to pursue hobbies and keep equipment. I mean, hell, I occupy a lot less space than the average American my age, but even I have five bicycles and a heap of touring hardware, which I keep crammed in a garage.
When Ann was planning her portion of this trip, she said, “I’ve done plenty of London and Berlin, and it feels like enough. But I could always do more Paris.” Now I understand why.
I came here on a bike loaded for wilderness-level touring. I couldn’t help it, because that’s the load-out I used in Iceland and the bike has been stored in a basement, untouched, since the Iceland tour finished almost two years ago. When I got here – to a rented apartment on Rue de la Fontaine au Roi – I stripped all the bags and gear off the bike and threw them in a closet, and have been going around with nothing but a phone, some Airpods, a house key, and a very sturdy bike lock.
Tried this cafe a second time, but the mocha was no better.
Tried this cafe a second time, but the mocha was no better.
Parisians seem to love the recumbent. Of the thousands of bicycles I’ve seen so far in the city, I haven’t seen a single recumbent, so it gets a lot of commentary. I understand why it would be rare: Paris has turned out to be what I would call an “expert level” place for bicycling, much more so than any other giant city I’ve been to in Europe, and you need to be very good on a recumbent to avoid injury in a place like this. Relatively speaking, Amsterdam, Brussels, Hamburg, Copenhagen, and London are all easier.
Back in the US, I’d say New York is relatively easy, and so is most of Boston and Chicago. In terms of danger I’d say that Paris is not top of the list – downtown LA occupies that spot for me so far – but it’s a strong second place. It’s not fear of deliberate violence I’m talking about, but the risk of accident, from the sheer press of people and the contempt they show for the rules. And it bears repeating: This is Europe. I have yet to experience bicycle touring in, for example, Rio de Janeiro or Bangkok. I’m sure Paris would be way down the list by then.
The weather is perfect, but the air quality is pretty bad. I’ve noticed that smog laws in Paris are treated as suggestions, especially by people on ancient scooters and mopeds. While biking around I’ve encountered entire city blocks that stink of car exhaust to the point of making me feel physically ill.
And I’ve gone to believe that the French take a dim view of laws and government in general, which I suppose is great where personal freedom is involved but is also a barrier to organization and urban planning, even daily logistics:
Will a shop respect its own posted hours? Maybe. Will you get warning when a street is closed for construction? Maybe. Will the bus actually stop where the schedule says? Maybe. Will the postman deliver your package? Maybe. Will there be a bike lane? Maybe. Will it be on the left, right, or middle or the street? Take a wild guess! Will there be a delivery truck parked right on top of it? Maybe. Will the train be on time? Maybe. What platform will it arrive on? Nobody knows until 20 minutes before it’s due to leave, ever, even if that train line has been operating for years, and even then it may be wrong.
Every intersection is a free-for-all hash of bicycles, people, cars, and scooters. Crosswalks are a suggestion. Crosswalk signals are less than a suggestion; they are ignored. On the other hand, people almost never honk their horns regardless of the thickness of the snarl or who is technically at fault, because the response they are most likely to get is, “screw you, this is France.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. What sort of organization would I expect, from a nation whose most truly defining era is still the French Revolution? Where laws, for the vast majority of its history, were used to funnel wealth upwards first – into the laps of clergy and kings – and organize people second? The nation I come from owes an incalculable debt to the same thinkers and activists that drove the French Revolution, and the influence shows, but I get the impression that the French had to swing a lot harder to knock their tyrants off their posts, and that impact is still echoing around in the culture here.
That’s a cerebral place to go, starting from a description of the air and the traffic… No doubt it’s subjective and I’ll have other impressions as the days continue.
