Day 14: Harwich to Cambridge and the wrap up

This final post of the trip will have multiple sections. One the traditional travelogue of the day and the rest on gear, clothing, kit, route etc.

The day

Due to some weird interaction between the Vodafone Maritime service, timezone changes and Apple's alarm app, we woke up at 4:30am. Two hours before disembarkation... This was not a great start to the day. The ferry had already docked and we stared at the trucks unloading in the early dawn light our of our giant porthole window. There were hundreds of trucks and, watching them driving off, one gets an insight into how much cross-border trade and transport goes on "under the hood" of economies. If only the Tory party had realised how much of this goes on day after day after day before they threw a giant bag of Brexit sand into the gears of the economy.

But you're not here for the economic commentary. "Tell us more about the biking stuff Dr K", "Were there any gravel factories?", "Any crap about number plates or interesting language digraphs today?".

So let us begin...and, it turns out...end.

Getting off the boat was surprisingly easy although we then waited for 45 minutes for passport control.

This was a bit miserable and considerably worse than the Dutch end.

We met a couple of blokes in their late 70s who had returned from a cycling holiday around the Dutch dijks. Dressed very nattily in khaki chinos, traditional business rain macs and flat caps, they seemed to have had a lovely time. One of them told us a very plausible reason for the great Dutch cycling infrastructure involving the oil crises of the 1970s but it turns out it was a load of old bollocks. Very confidently delivered though. Maybe he was an LLM in a rain macintosh. Read a lot more about the real history of Dutch cycling here. It's worth a read.

After passport control, we were out navigating the non-existent cycling infrastructure of Harwich and, of course, trying to remember which way roundabouts work in the UK and to ride on the left hand side of the road.

Fast cars, potholes, crap cycling path. So good to be home.

I had constructed a route back to Cambridge which mostly followed the South Suffolk Route A and since the route follows tiny Suffolk lanes, we weren't so worried about being mown down by a Ford Focus driven at speed by some bloke watching porn.

It was very pretty indeed.

Beautiful and quiet country lanes. Idyllic.

It would have been much nicer were it not for the fact that this part of the country is very much "rolling" countryside. Our legs had been lulled into a false sense of fitness by the endless flat plains and dijks of Germany and The Netherlands. Even the tiniest hills felt like trying to get up Alpe d'Huez. The temperature reached 37C which also added to the general sense of misery. "Why isn't this finished?".

We stopped for an uncharacteristically cheerful selfie next to a rather fine (and final) example of God's property portfolio.

Out of 4 selfies taken, this is the only one that vaguely looks like we're enjoying ourselves.

To add insult to injury, there were a lot of roadworks going on in Suffolk and we hit a few of these.

Oh...crap.

When you're hot and tired and have 1,600km of cycling in your legs, this really is the last thing you want to see. The diversions were hillier and they were definitely longer. We even ended up crossing a ford on a tiny bridge.

More premium UK cycling infrastructure.

The kilometers ticked down very very slowly indeed. We took a slight detour into Haverhill where we were greeted by some friends and family who had ridden out from Cambridge to ride the last bit in with us.

Coffee and a terrible cheese sandwich with friends and family.

Maybe not unsurprisingly, it's quite difficult to get back into the rhythm of conversation. We were both very tired and hot and had spent the past 14 days basically doing nothing else except talking to each other. It was a shock to the system to have to make what passes for normal conversation with friends.

As we rode back in a peloton, we gradually got into the rhythm. We were both absolutely crap on the hills as our legs decided that they would just turn into aged knicker elastic rather than put any more effort into getting us the final 20km back home.

I think we were stuck behind a giant combine harvester at this point.

I tried to take some pictures while cycling but...to be honest, I couldn't be arsed to do it well.

The other members of the peloton are behind my big sweaty hot head.

And then...we were done.

More friends and family were there to greet us and...our dog Ottie. We had both missed her a lot.

It's good to be back and the dog is happy too.

We ate canapés, drank champagne and took this photo to echo the one we had taken 15 days ago with the bikes in boxes and about to leave for Switzerland.

Back home and done for this year.

Equipment wrap up

Let's talk about bikes first. Both bikes are effectively identical. I had built up the Bat Bike™ for my first solo self-supported trip to Warsaw and then subsequently built an identical one for Dr T but I painted it an iridescent gold which resulted in it being named the Bling Bike™. 1x11 group set, deep section wheels, 32mm tubeless tyres.

I used the tool kit to make the bikes up in Andermatt and subsequently never needed to open the tool kit at all during the entire trip. I got one puncture somewhere near Vaduz and tyre jizz did it's thing and repaired it automatically. I pumped up the tyres once in Köln and, apart from oiling the chains every day, that was it. Hard to comprehend how two things I made managed to go all 1,600 km without a single mechanical problem. Since both bikes were built to a strict budget, they have very cheap power meters and there were a few days where they played up badly but...hey ho, power data isn't that important on trips like this.

We both used Restrap luggage. It too performed faultlessly. We had a 14 Litre Bean bag on the back which is large enough to store most of your clothes and a 10 Litre Handlebar Bag on the front which was a new innovation for me this year. Being able to pack all the heavy and awkward stuff like the iPad, the tool kit and the oil in a reasonably sized bag on the front took a lot of the weight off the back which made handling a little easier. The bar bag also has a little easy to access front pocket for passport, lightweight lock and the AirTag.

The only tiny issue with the handlebar bag was that it was slightly too big and would have rubbed on the front wheel.  I created this heath robinson "bodge" to fix it and it worked perfectly.

This is a cheap adjustable stem which holds the bag out from the tyre.

Ugly but I'm actually rather proud of this fix.

In total, it's probably more like 20 Litres in total and, to put that in context, your typical small overnight wheelie case that you take on a one night business trip has 50 litres of capacity.

Chargers are important and I used the iPad every day to write this blog. Without wanting to go into the details too much, something like SudoCrem is pretty important. Buy this.

I wore exactly the same stuff every single day and bought new pants when I needed them. Dr T managed some couture magic and conjured up somewhere between 7 and 10 different outfits out of the same space that I managed to conjure...one. Not quite sure how that works.

Cycling stuff needs to be washed every night but hotels seem to have given up on the concept of heated towel rails. My view, not widely shared,  is that this a harbinger of the end of civilisation.  The "towel-twist" technique isn't bad but laundrettes were the huge discovery on this trip. For less than ten euros, we could deep wash and dry almost everything we were carrying in less than two hours. This is a game changer for future trips.

Health and fitness

Your body just gradually decays on trips like this. By day 5 or 6 there's something going wrong every morning. Knees, Achilles tendons and, the dreaded undercarriage are a constant problem. One of my tricep muscles started spasming from about 2pm onwards.  

From 4 days in, our average heart rates were in the 100-110 range and even on hills, we never maxed out at more than 140. This is not a fitness challenge. It's a grit challenge. Every day you have to get up in the morning, download the Garmin route for the day, look at the display saying "125.38km to go" and just get on the bike and start turning your legs.

The Route

I can't recommend EV15 enough. It's incredibly well signed, easy to traverse and lots of towns and cities to stop at along the way. One is rarely, if ever, on the same roads as cars. There is a good series of books on the various Eurovelo routes published by Cicerone and I would recommend buying the relevant one if you're considering doing a trip like this.  I used it in advance to create Garmin routes for every stage.  Although EV15 is incredibly well signed, you really need to have a Garmin and know how to use it. Particularly in towns and cities you don't want to be stopping at some junction opening up a book and working out which way to go.

The Rhine valley starts out scenic and mountainous but, given how important the river is to the economy and industry of Europe, beyond Lake Constance there's a lot of oil plants, chemical factories, docks and, of course, gravel factories... Although we took a lot of photographs of this stuff, it's not nearly as overwhelming as you might thing. One can spend a day cycling through the Rhine/Ruhr corridor and you spend 80% of your time on well surfaced dikes looking at deer, rabbits and birds.

We took 13 days to get from the source to the end of the Rhine. It could be done in less time if you aimed for mean stage lengths of 150km rather than 110km but it would be pretty tough. A more relaxed schedule would expand this into maybe 20 days.

The entire route felt extraordinarily safe both from a cycling and personal perspective. This is very different from the EV6 route I did last year. Not a big surprise since we were cycling through some of the most stable western democracies in the world all of which have invested a lot of money in separating bikes from the fast-moving boxes of metal which kill cyclists.

Self Supported?

We carried everything we needed but we weren't camping. I maintain that camping on a trip like this is a false economy. You need a lot more stuff and although we were staying in better class hotels, it's possible to stay even in places like Germany pretty cheaply. Any bike that you're going to take on a trip like this is going to cost a few thousand pounds (or less than 1,000 if you build it yourself from bits from China) so you can probably afford a hotel for the night.

You do need to make sure you have everything you might need though.  For example, the tool kit had spare chain links, a chain braker, some tubeless patches, etc.  Pretty much everything except a catastrophic frame failure could have been handled even though, as it turned out, it wasn't needed.

The rediscovery of the self service laundrettes which I had frequented as a student was a game changer. Say goodbye to damp kit in the morning and say hello to fragrant smelling off-bike kit! 

Solo?

My previous three trips have been solo but this time Dr T came with me. It was really nice to share the whole experience. There's a lot less of sitting around on one's own in a restaurant drinking beer and writing a blog. The downsides are maybe more of a sense of responsibility. Twice as many mechanical things to go wrong, more consensus building required. Not in any way worse but definitely different.

Dr T started doing a daily blog entry but in the end, doing these blogs every night is pain in the bum.  Dr T has shown great fortitude putting up with me for 14 days and 16 hours each day.  She gives the strong impression that she actually enjoyed it and there's no indication that a divorce lawyer is on speed dial.

That's a win in my book. 

Will there be another one of these next year?

We shall see...

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