We found a cafe in the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland, and ate a buffet breakfast sitting at the windows, with the bikes parked outside in view. As usual, lots of pedestrians stopped to scope out the recumbents, look confused, then move on.
Since we had to switch hotels in the evening, we had all our touring gear packed back on the bikes. It was annoying but we got by.
They walked from place to place in a big group, stopping at arranged locations and giving 15-minute performances. We saw them half a dozen times at least.
It looked like great fun, and they collected a decent amount of cash too.
The extra flourishes some of the drummers made were cool. Were they traditional, or improvised moves? I didn’t know.
We walked the bikes on the High Street. The crowds were just ludicrous.
The Royal Mile is by far the busiest street in Edinburgh.
The Royal Mile is by far the busiest street in Edinburgh.
Every three blocks or so, a different person was stationed, playing the bagpipes. The effect was almost spiritual, like after 700 years of the instrument playing in this region (possibly as much as 3000 years), the sound of bagpipes was infused into the very stones and just vibrated out like heat.
Sometimes they were deployed a little too close to each other, and the overlap created weird harmonics.
The new hotel was on the north side of town, and our room was up three flights of stairs. There was no elevator, so we had to haul the bikes all the way.
When we settled in, the extra height was refreshing though. I opened the windows and was treated to a night time performance:
Today needed to be a workday, but I didn’t mind at all because there was an amazing setting for it: St. Martin’s Church. It wasn’t that far outside of town, so I rolled over after breakfast.
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!
