On The Way To Canterbury

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.

First, of course, we packed up and went searching for breakfast.

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.

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.

When we met at the church we sat around a while, resting and taking photos.

I enjoyed getting a shot of Nick at St. Nick’s.

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 past the cliffs, so the real countryside could start. It did not disappoint.

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!

Meanwhile, Nick got into a staring contest with some sheep:

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 found this wall fascinating. I needed to come back and spend more time here. Perhaps tomorrow?

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.

We would have loved to check out Canterbury Castle, but alas, it was closed.

As the sun set we cruised around the cathedral.

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!

Ferry To The Cliffs Of Dover

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.”