Cambridge Warsaw

This is the complete set of posts that I made on my 2022 bike trip from Cambridge to Warsaw. I've tried to fix the original spelling mistakes and oddly worded sentences — but it's important to remember that most of this was written in the evening after 150 km+ on the bike that day and a number of glasses of wine...

A bad moment on the trip

Day 0: And So It Begins

I'm riding from Cambridge to Warsaw on a bike I built from bits off the internet. 2,000 km self-supported and solo. This is almost certainly a Bad Idea™ but, having committed to it publicly (well, amongst my friends), there isn't really any escape.

I had planned to do this in 2021 and I was going to go from Cambridge to Moscow. However, a number of things conspired to make this a much harder enterprise than it might have been. Obviously the whole global pandemic thing made it pretty much impossible. There were times when one needed to self-isolate in a hotel for 10 days on entry to the Netherlands for example. Given how quickly the pandemic rules changed, I had visions of being stuck for a week in some Soviet era hotel in Minsk living off potatoes.

The other issue which reared its head in 2022 was Vlad the Mad and Bad invaded Ukraine. I was intending to ride there and get a flight back — I’m not such a complete idiot that I would do this trip both ways. Banning flights from Russia within European airspace was another nail in the coffin of the big trip. I had also had a little dose of realism from Tim Moore’s book The Cyclist Who Went Out In The Cold. Tim’s books really inspired me to do a self supported long ride but this book opened my eyes to the trials and tribulations of cycling in the FSU.

So Cambridge to Warsaw it became. Apart from the first bit from Cambridge to Harwich, I would be following the Eurovelo 2 route. The Eurovelo organisation creates routes all over Europe which are, in some places, mapped and signed but in others are somewhat sketchy. This is a very worthy cause and they do a good job at it. However, their website is like something out of the 1990s and the map that you have to buy to get access to the GPS tracks is useless. It's hard to overstate how clunky the whole thing is. I suspect I will be doing some on-the-trip-mapping-and-route-finding...

So what do you need to do something like this apart from an irrational belief in your own immortality? Surprisingly, some elements of the trip require much less planning than a typical group ride trip. I know roughly which way I'm going but, beyond the first night on the ferry, I only have one hotel booked. After that, I'm going to rely on stopping when I'm tired and finding a hotel room. You just can't do that with 10 people. It will also be nice to not have to do the, understandable, dance of negotiation and accommodation with other people. If I feel good then I'll keep going longer, if I feel bad, I'll do a shorter day. If I want to eat Chinese food or pizza five nights in a row, I'll do it.

However much fun that will be, the much harder bit will be travelling for upwards of 14 days carrying everything I need. During the day I'll be wearing my cycle gear and therefore all I'll need in the cycle bag is a pair of trousers, shoes, t-shirt to change into in the evening while I wash my cycling kit and dry it overnight. Some very light toiletries and the cables and chargers I'll need for

• Bike power meter
• Garmin
• Phone
• Watch
• Headphones
• iPad
• Lights

Add in a really light bike lock, tools to fix the bike and a spare tube or two and the whole lot comes in at less than 4kgs.

Weight is everything on the bike especially on the hilly bits so I have spent as much time as possible trying to get the weight down. The trousers I taking are horrid nylon monstrosities which weigh almost nothing but look like something a tramp would wear on a bad day. There is a tiny nagging voice at the back of my mind reminding me that I could have eaten a bit less lard for a week and I could have taken much better trousers and still had the same "system weight".

And, with that, I'm ready to go. It's the day before I leave and I'm trying to work out what I am likely to have forgotten and wondering what the weather is going to be like. I'm not very worried about anything but a little bit worried about everything. Will the bike work properly for 2,000 km, will my legs work for 2,000km, will I be able to find a place to stay each night, will I get crashingly bored and be forced to be one of those weird loners in hotels who strikes up conversations with strangers. "Hi, I haven't spoken to anybody for four days, would you like to listen to a stream of gibberish about how sore my arse is?". Not one of the classic conversational gambits.

We will see how it goes. Into the unknown...

Day 1: Cambridge to Harwich

The Stats:

• Distance: 112km
• Average Speed: 22.6km/h
• Legs: 😕
• Undercarriage: 😐
• Bike: 🙂

All dressed up and ready to go. It was time to leave at 3pm for an 8pm boarding at Harwich and an 11pm sailing.

I’d already taken care of my sports performance nutrition.

Some of my ex-colleagues at Cantab very kindly turned up to wave me off and, after all the prep and worrying about it, it was time to actually turn the pedals and start the journey. The first 10 or 20 km were on roads that I cycle a lot around Cambridge so they were a a good test of how I felt and how the bike felt. The answer to both those questions was…shit. Riding a bike with an extra 6kg attached to it is not great. The big kidney bean shaped thing on the back weighs nearly 5kg and it wobbles about and makes the bike feel terrible. It was humid and my legs really didn’t want to do this. Which is fair enough because they’re going to be getting a bit of a beating over the next two weeks and therefore some reticence from the legs is to be expected.

Eventually I got into the groove and it started to go better although if I got out of the saddle on a climb, it felt like I was wrestling a hippo. An angry hippo with the kidney-bean-of-doom attached to it.

Cambridgeshire turned into Suffolk and the kilometers to Harwich ticked down slowly. There was a sudden burst of wildlife when a hare ran over the road in front of me and a flock of birds burst out of a hedge giving me a shock. A fully grown deer bounded across the road in front of me and a butterfly got stuck in my helmet. I was half expecting a Velociraptor to bound out of a ditch and go for my throat.

Due to the proximity of Duxford, there’s always a few old planes flying about Suffolk. Today was pretty special since there were two Spitfires up practicing close format flying. I know the distance makes it look very close but if I was flying one of the few priceless icons of the Second World War, I would probably take it a bit easy on the “I can scratch the other pilot’s nose from here” distances.

Suffolk is annoyingly rolling and, although there was nothing huge, I would repeatedly roll down into a hollow and then have to wrestle the angry hippo up a long drag. It's tiring but luckily there was maximum security prison in Suffolk about half way and the shop outside sells Irn Bru. I wonder if there’s some correlation? Irn Bru is well known Scottish hangover cure but it’s also a great sports drink as long as you can cope with your teeth dissolving.

Anyway, gradually Suffolk got a bit flatter and my pace rose a bit but, unfortunately, the quality of the driving in Suffolk (and subsequently Essex) deteriorated dramatically. It went from “A bit annoying but not too dangerous” to “full-on Italian driving round Rome in a beat up Fiat Punto”. On single track roads, drivers would come swinging round blind corners at 50/60mph and then slam on the brakes as they saw my terrified face. On two lane roads, drivers would come right up behind me at 70mph, and either (a) slam on the brakes and rev their engines loudly or (b) just barely pull out and zip by at 70mph. It was pretty trying. The constant soundtrack of thumping house music played through speakers and amplifiers which reduced the "music" to distorted mush was not great. Also, there seems to be a bit of a thing with drilling out silencers to make cars sound louder. Those growling exhausts (occasionally augmented with a 8000rpm top-note from the organ-donors bikers proving their worth on quiet country roads) was…dispiriting.

I stopped and took a picture of a church to try and reduce my adrenaline levels a bit.

I had spent quite a bit of time — you have a lot of time on a bike — thinking about why Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Essex get bucolic English countryside scenes so wrong. It’s as if the Cotswolds and Surrey are "Waitrose scenery" and Suffolk/Essex is “countryside done by Aldi”. Every time you a lovely farmhouse would appear, there would be an horrendous corrugated iron shed stuck to the side. The fields — which are each the size of Belgium — would look lovely until you saw the half a dozen lorries gently rusting in the corner or the giant pile of chicken shit. It was vexing but it did pass the time. As the sun went down and the shadows lengthened, everything looked more beautiful and warm. Maybe I was putting Suffolk down because I was tired, hungry and grumpy. In the red evening light, it looked lovely. Happy now Suffolk?

Finally, the rolling Suffolk hills were done but they did have a sting in the tail for the end. After swooping down into a village in a hollow, it turned out that the road out was a 12% climb. 12% is hard enough but with an osmium kidney bean on the back of the bike it was an exceptionally hard pull. Quite a lot of “oops, there goes the red-zone-heart-rate warning” on that short and brutal climb.

I crossed a tributary of the main Harwich estuary and ended up in Essex, deep in Brexitland. The quality of the driving deteriorated more and almost every house had a St George’s cross outside. One house even had a garden full of extremely inappropriate statues depicting racial stereotypes. It’s a different world there.

I was hoping that the route would just take me down the edge of the estuary. Estuaries, rivers and railway tracks are the cyclist’s friend because they’re flat but for some reason, the route took me away from the estuary and into the rolling hills behind it. Thanks topography! That’s just what I needed. Frequent but incorrect road closed signed were a final kick in the nuts.

The cranes and ships of Harwich appeared on the horizon. A time-trial-of-death down the A120 got me to the terminal although some lorry drivers had a good old try to stop me getting there by turning me into a very flat squished cyclist. Stenaline made it easy to to check-in although I did have to bring down the misanthrope curtain to avoid picking up some cyclist “friends” as we checked in. Everything went swimmingly getting into the boarding area and I’d arrived almost perfectly on time. However boarding was delayed for 90 minutes and, as far as I’m aware, professional cyclists don’t hang around in a windy car park, thirsty and hungry for 90 minutes after they’ve done their thing. Those 90 minutes were miserable even after I had found a vending machine which contained liquids. I was, by now, less dehydrated but cold and very hungry.

Boarding was very cool when it finally happened. Cyclists are first and we rode up the huge ramps that get the lorries on. I gave the elderly couple who wanted to be my friends the slip, got to my cabin, showered and changed into my “other clothes” — of which more in a later blog.

I had splashed out for the ‘Captains Cabin for Three” just for myself which I considered 89 EUR well spent what with the misanthropy ‘n’ all. It was actually pretty good with a comfy bed and a hot shower and, let's face it, I don’t really need much more.

I’d burned 2,174 calories in 5 hours and therefore I was justified in loading up at the buffet. The food tasted as bad as it looks but the two tiny bottles of wine went down pretty well. I’ll need sleep tonight even though it wasn’t a huge day.

Tomorrow…Holland. I have a big stage tomorrow. I’m meeting my friend Gideon Richheimer for dinner in Arnhem. Gideon runs Autofill which was a great cohort company in the very first DeepTech.labs programme. Very smart tech indeed. They’re based in Amsterdam but Gideon has very kindly offered to drive down to meet me for dinner in Arnhem. The only issue is that Arnhem is 200km from Hoek van Holland. It’s going to be a tough day.

Day 2: Hoek van Holland to Arnhem

The Stats:

• Distance: 189km
• Average Speed:
• Legs: 😐
• Undercarriage: 😢
• Bike: 🙂
  

I was woken at 4:30am by an announcement on the ship’s tannoy. A lugubrious Liverpudlian explained that it was 4:30am, we would be docking in two hours and thirty minutes and breakfast was being served.

I rushed down to the breakfast buffet and paid my €15 to stuff my face. I was surrounded by a group of about 50 tiny Spanish teenaged girls who were picking at some fruit salad. They looked on in horror as the shattered long-distance-cyclist stuffed bacon rolls and black coffee into his food-hole.

Breakfast of Champions

I packed up the kidney-bean-of-despair and got the bike ready to go. I literally rolled off the ship first, had a 30 second wait at passport control and I was off. After some slightly undignified faffing about in the car park, I found the start of the EuroVelo Route 2 and I was off.

Almost immediately I joined a special cycle path and for the next 189 km, I was rarely off them. The cycling infrastructure in Holland is just astonishingly good. Bikes have right-of-way almost everywhere and, if the road is painted red, then bikes have priority. Roundabouts have special bike lanes. On narrow lanes next to canals or rivers, they paint two wide bike lanes down each side and the cars have to fight it out over one lane in the middle.

I’d like to comment on Dutch driving but, to be honest, I hardly saw any of it.

Last view of the sea

The route runs up the coast towards Den Haag. The bike path runs through the coastal dunes and reminded me of the Northumbrian coastline. Lots of people were out on their bikes, running on the beach, walking their dogs and prepping for picnics. To be honest, it was pretty chilly at 8:30am but that was going to change. Oh yes.

The EV2 route is called the “Capitals Route” and therefore the northward deviation was fully on brand. I don’t really know anything about Den Haag apart from what I’ve seen in the dramatic ending to The Hitman’s Bodyguard. Since Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson and Gary Oldman weren’t blowing things up and shooting people, Den Haag seemed quiet. I was through it pretty quickly and back out into the countryside.

It is fair to say that Holland is the neatest place I have ever been. The farms are neat and tidy. All the fences are straight and new. All the fields are tilled or sown with almost geometric precision. There’s none of that “let’s put a rusty lorry in the field” or big piles of poo. Farming in Holland also seems to focus on very high productivity and very high value. Near Hoek van Holland and Den Haag, there are greenhouses as far as the eye can see. All new, all well maintained. Inland even tiny pockets of land are maintained and used for something. I saw a small field (maybe 1/10th of hectare) with four llamas on it.

As the route pushed eastwards, it was primarily along the banks of canals and rivers. Holland is densely populated so there are a lot of houses and every single one of them was fantastically maintained. I didn’t see a single badly maintained house and the gardens were all perfect. Each house had a huge spray of blooms, a manicured lawn and some neatly trimmed bushes. I don’t just mean “a lot of them” or “most of them”, I mean “all of them”. Even houses in more modest areas were neat, tidy and have a lovely garden.

Finally on the “neatness” thing, I had noticed that the roads and verges were pretty clean around about Utrecht, I thought I would start counting the roadside trash I saw. In 100km I saw one fag packet and two coke cans. In 100km! In both the UK and Mallorca where I am most familiar with the roadside littering, you’d see half a dozen fag packets, a McDonalds carton and 10 beer cans every 5km…

Den Haag to Utrecht was pretty good. The temperature got higher. I saw my first windmill.

They do have windmills in Holland

And I saw my first indoor ski park on stilts.

Actually, that’s a lie. I’ve seen the one in Tokyo.

As the afternoon progressed, it got a lot hotter and I started to suffer. The faceless bureaucrats planning the EV2 route seemed to delight making the route more wiggly than it had to be. “You’re on your way to Arnhem sir? Why not take a detour through these hilly woods on gravel trails? They’re lovely”…

Around 130 km, I had foolishly run out of water and was feeling a bit the worse for wear. The problem with scenic bike trails is that they avoid the towns and hence avoid the shops which sell liquids to an increasingly delirious long-distance cyclist. My average speed was getting slower and slower and the dreaded “pottering” was taking over.

Suddenly, in the middle of a wooded track, I came across two young Dutch girls selling cakes and cans of coke. Luckily, their English was better than my non-existent Dutch -- it was probably better than my English to be honest. I bought two cans of coke and two cakes. It came to €3.15 so I gave then €10 and told them to keep the change for saving my life. Well, not saving my life but stopping me getting into an even bigger mess.

These girls saved my life.

As I got increasingly delirious, I started to obsess about how tall the Dutch are. I have always known that the Dutch are one of the tallest nations on Earth but it just started to weigh on my mind. As my speed dropped further, I would be passed by beautiful tall, leggy and bronzed men and women on their sit up and beg bikes. I would look over the canal and there were four tall, bronzed, older men playing padel. I’d cycle past a tall beautiful women tending her lawn. They were everywhere. When the younger and serious racing-cyclists whizzed past me on their high-end carbon bikes they would look like Lycra-clad stick insects on the largest possible frames.

This came to a head when I stopped at a set of lights. I was still 35k from Arnhem and I was sweaty and tired. With a swish and a skid, a vision of loveliness arrived at the lights and asked me where I was going. She told me that I should take a short cut and would be able to cut it down to 25 km. Not wishing to blub with gratitude, I pulled away from the lights and fell into the gutter. It was an ignominious end.

The final 25 km went slowly. Especially slowly since the vision of loveliness hadn’t explained that there were some rolling hills on the short route. Admittedly only 3% but after you’ve spent most of the day with the incline indicator pegged at 0%, these came as a shock. The Garmin told me that I was going through NudePark which promised a lot but seriously underdelivered.

It is an industrial park…

I rolled down into Arnhem and using a bastardised combination of Garmin and GoogleMaps I found the hotel. The Ibis Styles in Arnhem is one of those hotels which is stamped out of a mould somewhere and then shipped to Holland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Soulless but I couldn’t really complain. Except when the receptionist explained that I couldn’t take my bike to the room and it had to be left in an unlocked courtyard round the back. When I mumbled something about Ibis taking responsibility for the loss, the receptionist guffawed in my face.

One shower later I felt a little more human. I washed my kit — which was still wet at 10:30pm…. There has definitely been some…er…undercarriage damage today. I’ve applied SudoCrem to the affected area on the basis that SudoCrem worked wonders on the kids’ nappy-rash. I hope it works and that my kit dries by tomorrow.

After a bit of a wander round the (unsurprisingly) spotless downtown area of Arnhem, I met Gideon for dinner. He had booked a fantastic Italian restaurant and, burning 3000+ calories a day meant that I could lay waste to both the pasta menu and the desert menu.

I’m the one smeared with pasta sauce and the second giant beer.

Tomorrow is supposed to be Münster. It’s another 200k and I’m not sure if I’ve got another 200k in my legs especially since it’s not nearly as flat as today’s stage. We shall see. I might be able to cut the distance down by ignoring the EV2 at strategic points.

Here is the strava segment for obsessives.

Day 3: Arnhem to Munster

The Stats:

• Distance: 153km
• Average Speed: 22.5km.h
• Legs: 😢
• Undercarriage: 😕
• Bike: 😐

Despite the picture of Arnhem Cathedral making it look like a lovely day, it was cloudy when I woke up. Sadly, my overnight washing and drying plan hadn’t worked too well for my shorts and they were still decidedly…moist. This was an improvement on my socks which were decidedly…soaking. I have been given some tips involving towels and twisting so I’ll give that a try later on today.

I’d prepaid for breakfast (woo hoo) and attempted to stuff as many calories as possible into my gob to fortify me for the ride ahead. I did some mapping while I was feeling a bit sick after speed eating one bacon roll, one cheese roll and one jam roll. I realised that the EuroVelo 2 route was 209km from Arnhem to Münster but creating a route on Garmin it was 150 km. In other places I might have gone with the Velocrats’ route but the infrastructure is just so good in Holland (and presumably Germany) that I was pretty certain that doing a “popularity routing” route wouldn’t leave me scrabbling along the edge of a 6 lane highway as amphetamine-fuelled truckers blasted past inches from my left elbow

Rolling out of Arnhem was pretty easy and, as predicted, the straight route remained on the (bewilderingly good) Dutch cycle infrastructure. In the 300k I rode in Holland, I was never on the same road as cars unless it was a very clearly marked shared car/bike path where the bikes had priority. Amazing.

20k in, I was feeling a bit hot and so stopped in Beeks for some refreshment.

If there’s one thing I won’t miss about Holland — and it’s only one thing — it is that the contactless card systems in Holland are crap. They only take “Maestro” cards. So, for the first time in 3 years, I had to get some cash out of a cash machine,

The Coop. Purveyor of fine liquids to the thirsty traveller.

Two large bottles of full fat coke and I said goodbye to Beeks. And Beeks said goodbye to me.

Fuck Off Hold On GIFfromFuck Off GIFs

Right outside Beeks there was the first climb of the day. It was only 1.5km at an average of 3% but after that lovely day of Dutch Flatty McFlatface it felt like the final kilometre of the Planche des Belles Filles. Part of the trick to long distance cycling is to avoid going into the red zone Low heart rate (<130bpm for me) and keeping the power below 200w makes it possible to do 7 to 9 hour long days The devil’s kidney bean means that 200w up a hill doesn’t get you anywhere and thus there was a bit of a relapse regarding my Cyclists Tourette’s™ I’m afraid.

Once I had got my breath back it was a return to the long roads which all looked alike.

This. Just this. For a long time.

For some reason this appeared to be tiny-horse country. I saw loads of these midget horses.

Not everything is tall in Holland

I was looking forward to the border. I had it all planned: I’d get the selfie stick from the cursed kidney bean and take a snap of me beaming like a mad-man, the bike and the sign that said Deutschland. That would be one for the blog and the family album.

However, there was nothing there. One minute I was riding along a bike path called Europaweg and then it turned into Europastraße and I was in Germany. When one is in the Schengen Zone, borders — and all the attendant noise that’s generated by idiots (yes, I am looking at you The Conservative Party and Nigel Farage) — just seems so…last century.

More water stops ensued. After taking out money from the bank, it appears that Germany is fully up to speed with Apple Pay and it looks like I’ll be carrying around €300 in cash for the rest of the trip. I saw a lot more litter too.

Depressing after the cleanliness of Holland

The cycling infrastructure deteriorated a bit. In Holland, it’s all custom built and well maintained. In Germany it’s more the case of a path down the side of a busy road or country roads with low traffic. Still about 1,000,000 times better than what we’re used to in the UK (or Spain for that matter) but a step down from Holland.

A lot of this

And a small amount of this

Most of the cyclists on the roads and paths were elderly couples on electric bikes. They’re limited to 25 km/h and so I could definitely take them on the flat. On the rises, the twinkly old couples would destroy me -- much to my chagrin. It got hotter but a strong westerly wind started to blow behind me. Oh thank you God Of Cycling, you have made my day. It wasn’t strong enough on the second hill of the day to negate the drag of the kidney bean of doom but it did help a bit. There were even a few drops of rain and when it is 30C, you really welcome the rain. I put my iPods in and listened to some appropriately loud and energising music.

Germany is bigger than Holland. Much bigger. So the farming is less intense and they’ve obviously managed to keep a lot of woodland. The woods are old and not a little scary.

Little red riding hood country

As I barrelled along singing power ballads out of tune, I totally forgot the key feature of strong tail winds: when you turn left, they turn into a Sneaky Side Wind™. At the end of a straight path, there was a right angled bend, it was a bit gravelly and the Sneaky Side Wind grabbed a hold of the kidney bean of death as I was wobbling round the corner, I hit the gravel, slipped and ended up in a hedge.

I got up and prepared to give the kidney bean a foul-mouthed and richly deserved shoeing. I’d just delivered the first kick in time to a great beat from Prince when I realised that (a) my iPad was in the kidney bean and (b) somebody was tapping me on the shoulder. I turned round to see a twinkly old bloke holding his top-of-the-line electric bike, looking concerned and motioning me to remove my headphones. I was preparing my stock German phrase (which ironically is “Es tut mir schrecklich leid, aber ich spreche kein Deutsch. Sprechen Sie Englisch?” which translates as “I’m sorry, I speak no German, do you speak English?”) when he interrupted and said (in perfect English) “I hope you are alright, that graze on your leg next to the old one looks a bit worrying, would you like a plaster? Also, I find that abusing one’s equipment is a bad strategy for long distance cycling”. Clearly some of the foul-mouthed adjectives had made it out of my mouth before the first kick. I apologised and blamed my lack of food. To be fair, it was 4pm and I hadn’t eaten since 7am but I think I might need to adjust my fuelling strategy if only to avoid upsetting the locals with my Cyclists Tourette’s™.

At great length, as the dreaded “bonk” took hold, Münster hove into view. I took the headphones out and spent a adrenaline-filled 30 minutes working my way to the hotel. Münster had saved up some cobbles (or pavé as it is known in the trade) for the final 500m. My undercarriage did not thank Münster for that.

Oh great.

The hotel is ok but once again, I couldn't take my bike to the room but have to leave it in some bike park 500m away from the hotel which was a giant pain in the bum on top of 150 km of cycling which had already pained my bum.

I unpacked and washed my clothes including my spare socks and pants which were unfortunately covered in toothpaste probably as a result of the loss of temper with the kidney bean. That’ll teach me to lose my temper with inanimate objects.

The receptionist at the hotel was a little reserved when I asked her for a good restaurant. I think my expression of displeasure at having to walk 500m to park my bike had soured our relationship a bit. However, after a grovelling apology and a description of why I had been a little tetchy when I arrived, she understood what I wanted.

Beer and…

…stodge.

Two very large and very strong beers later and a lot of stodge, I was feeling a bit better about the world. One of the great things about Germany is that everybody eats early. At 8:20pm people are going home. Thank god I’m not in Spain and I can eat early without looking like a Nobby-no-mates who eats…early.

As I walked back to the hotel, full of stodge and beer, I felt good about Münster. The populace was out and about, sitting in the setting sun outside in the twee little cafes and restaurants eating their own stodge and drinking their own beer. They looked happy and contented. And so was I.

Tomorrow I’m going to try to get to Höxter. On the EuroVelo 2 “let’s go the long way round” route, it’s 210k. My route is 150 km. Take that Velocrats!

The Germany part of today was an introduction to the rolling hills that I’m going to be “enjoying” for the next three or four days. Not looking forward to fighting the angry hippo and the kidney bean of desolation up and down hills.

I had planned to do a round up of my experiences of Holland in this blog but I am going to wait for a few days. Let it all settle and think about it for a while. If there is one thing I have more than enough of right now, it’s time to think when I’m riding along.

Day 4: Munster to Hoxter

The Stats:

• Distance: 152km
• Average Speed: 20.5km/h
• Legs: 😕 — But I’ve no idea how my legs should feel after 611k in four days
• Undercarriage: 🙂 — prophylactic application of SudoCrem did the job
• Bike: 😢 — see later

Münster at 7am

I’d like to say that the day dawned bright and clear but in fact it was dull and rainy. This was supposed to be a “heads-down, non-nonsense, mindless boogie cycle" but it didn’t look like it was going to be.

For some reason, cycling all day doesn’t mean I sleep all night and so I was up at 6am and banging on the breakfast salon door at 6:30. Showing superhuman self-control I didn’t know I possessed, I avoided the fried pork products and had 3 cheese and ham roll supplemented with four cups of strong coffee. Caffeine is known to help one metabolise fat although during the course of the day but the other biological effect of caffeine would come to the fore as I disappeared behind a tree 6 or 7 times on the way to Höxter.

I will say this about Germany: it’s pretty empty and so there’s lots of opportunities for “nature wees” which is not the case in Holland. Every time I stopped for a comfort break in Holland Johann Cruyff or the King of the Netherlands would be looking over a hedge mutely asking me to stop despoiling their country.

There’s a certain rhythm to cycling 150 km in a day. The first 5 km are just trying to get out of whatever town you’re in. This is always a terrifying dash across junctions where you have no idea where you’re going. Then the next 25 km are checking out how your body is feeling and how the bike is going. “Oh, the vision of loveliness bruise on my knee is better”. “What’s that funny scraping noise from the rear mech?”. “Bit of a twinge in the shoulder-blades. Wonder if I’m having a heart attack?”. There’s also a lot of obsessive Garmin fiddling. “Is it really 130 km to go? Look at all the climbing still to go. JESUS CHRIST, that was close!”. This last one is when you’re too busy fiddling with your Garmin to see the junction between the bike path and the main road coming up at speed. However, mostly there weren’t any junctions and it all looked a bit like this

Lots and lots of this

I’d been rained on a bit over the course of the first 30 km so I thought it was time for some more caffeine intake. I asked for a large coffee and when it arrived, the coffee cup was big enough to bathe a kitten in. Not that that would be a good thing to do with a kitten I suppose.

Without the giant kidney bean, that would be a good looking bike.

Once I left Warendorf, I was on the 30 km to 75 km stretch. Always a difficult stretch because there’s still more to go than the distance you have been. As Warendorf sputtered to an end in a confusing maze of industrial parks and retail monstrosities, the skies opened. I thought it was raining before. It wasn’t.

This is how wet it was. For two hours.

It rained and rained and rained. It’s August! In Central Europe. What’s going on?

My super expensive and lightweight Rapha shell kept my body dry but the rest of me was soaked as about 3cm of rain fell in 2 hours most of which ended up in my shoes. As I rode along, a rhythmic squelch sound joined the mildly worrying scrapes and grinding from the chain and gears and by Augustdorf I was miserable, wet and worried about the bike.

There was a lot of stopping under trees

I passed through the magic 75 km line which allowed me to (miserably) sing 🎶Wo-ohh we’re half way there, wo-ohh, livin’ on a prayer🎶. The 75 km mark is normally a little psychological boost but everything was dirty and wet.

These calves and these socks were pretty clean this morning

The first hill came at 90 km and it hit hard. The bean of desolation had performed pretty well and I suspected the kicking I gave it yesterday encouraged some good behaviour. It had acted as a heavy yet serviceable rear mud-guard so the back of my shorts weren’t ruined but, once the road kicked up, it was back to wrestling the hippo and loudly casting aspersions about the marital status of the death-bean’s parents as it rolled and wobbled underneath me. It became apparent that 600 km in my legs in three and a half days was too much. No power, no stamina and any gradient more than 3% left me wishing for an even smaller granny gear.

Even though it was raining, the twinkly old couples on their e-bikes were still out and I cursed them roundly as they effortlessly zoomed past me on the hill. I tried using the selfie-stick that I’d carried all the way here but it was broken for some reason so I couldn’t do an action-misery shot on the road.

The 100 km mark came and went. The is normally a moment of celebration (🎶Wo-ohh we’re two thirds of the way there🎶) but not today. Another coffee stop and I had 50 km and two climbs still to do. It seemed like it would be a good idea to take some fuel on board so I stopped in some nameless town and found the bakkerie. I was in dire need of a cheese sandwich and a cake but unfortunately I was behind a bloke with his three kids who took 10 minutes to decide which cakes to choose. My righteous anger raised my core temperature enough to stop shivering. When I finally got the food, and another coffee naturally, my eyeballs were vibrating with the lack of food...or maybe it was the coffee. Anyway, I shot some pointed looks at the indecisive family and stuffed cake into my cake-hole.

My AirPods had run out of juice and while waiting for them to charge up, I cycled towards the second hill. The bike was making a terrible noise which I hadn’t noticed due to the banging tunes playing in my ears. I realised that I hadn’t lubricated the chain since Cambridge. Doh! I normally oil my chain every two or three rides but, of course, it’s about distance, not the cardinal of the rides. I’d done 550 km before I realised that I needed to oil the chain. Normally that would be 150 km. In addition, the rain had washed off the high performance “dry weather lube” I have. A stop for some roadside chain lubing sorted out most of the scrapes and rattles.

The second climb was through a military training area festooned with warnings in four languages about the danger of death were you to leave the road but to be honest, there was a danger of death on the road too. The angry kidney bean was misbehaving, the road was one of those ones made out of concrete blocks and my shuffled cycling playlist was throwing up all the wrong songs at all the wrong times. I was so dispirited and tired, I couldn’t even work out how to shift the songs on to the next one when the wrong type of song came up. I climbed to Tom Waits groaning and just made do with insulting Ed “bloody” Sheerhan as he moaned his songs out.

The descent was steep and hairy. Wet roads and cold hands are a not a good combination and descending at 60 km/h with a kidney-bean-of-death induced road wobble is seriously scary. But, since the downhills are “free” kilometres, you feel you have to take them.

I’d started to notice a certain lack of purpose to the route in the final 50 km. There was a lot of wiggling around on quiet farm tracks gazing balefully at maize fields the size of Belgium. Why would we take the long route between these two towns? At length it became clear that the cursed EuroVelocrats were to blame.

I see that R1 sign!

Garmin’s popularity routing algorithm had locked onto the Eurovelo route (R2 joins with R1 at this point) and so I was being treated to a nice countryside wander for people who really like maize fields.

However, it’s fair to say that the roads were very nice. Rolling (grr) but nice. Some of the downhill bits of the rolling hills were made a lot more scary by these little bastards which fall from the fruit trees which line the farm roads.

You little bastard

These unripe crab-apples drop from the trees and are about as hard as a ball bearing. The first time my front wheel hit one, I had a moment of white knuckled terror. The bike bucked under me, the front wheel skidded, the kidney-bean prepared to make recovery impossible and…somehow it all came back together.

I don’t know much German but this sign up the final climb didn’t look good.

“Berg”. Hmmm.

It wasn’t good. It had stopped raining but I was out of energy and I didn’t even have the energy to swear at Ed “bloody” Sheerhan who was inserting his baleful presence into my playlist again. I just ground up the hill at 8 km/h feeling like I was dead and rather hoping that I was going to be soon.

Every sport has its miracle moments...the moments when everything goes freakishly well. That night you were on the pool table at the Dog Bother’s Arms all night and even the tricky double shots came off. That one game of tennis where every first serve went in. At the top of the final climb, the sun came out and I started one of the most enjoyable 20 minutes I’ve had on a bike. A gradient of 1% down for about 10 km on a fresh tarmac cycle path which wound down through woods. Apple Music had banished Ed “bloody” Sheerhan and I listened to AC/DC as a swooped round the corners sticking my inside knee out like those blokes on motorbikes. The descent just went on and on and, when it became flat, there was my hotel.

The hotel is a perfect example of a lovely little family hotel which has grown larger over the years. I didn’t realise that it’s on both sides of the road and so after going down to the 2nd basement and walking through a tunnel and back up again, I met the receptionist who had literally just walked over the road. “You like our elevator Mr Kirk?” the receptionist said. I felt like an idiot.

There are two things which make a long distance self-supported cyclist happy in the evening.

First thing: A heated towel rail.

I washed everything. This resulted in a certain “commando” element to going out to dinner but who knew when I’d find another towel rail with an “extra-hot” mode?

The second thing: unlimited buffets

Unlimited all you can eat Chinese buffet is the perfect meal. No need to use Google Lens to translate the menu, just go up to the buffet and pile your plate up with the stuff that looks good and then go and pile it up again. The staff at the restaurant looked a little sad that their profits for the night were walking out in my stomach. They definitely didn’t make money charging me €13.50 for the meal but I guess they made it back on the, now traditional, two giant beers.

I’m going to do a shorter day tomorrow. There’s only 105 km between here and Goslar but there’s 1250 metres of climbing. On my current form, that’s going to be enough.

Weather looks better for tomorrow and my shorts, top and socks are going to be lovely and dry.

Day 5: Höxter to Goslar

• Distance: 124km 😐
• Average Speed: 18.2 km/h 😢
• Legs: 😢😢
• Undercarriage: 😐
• Bike: 🙂

The combination of a surfeit of chicken fried rice with extra pork bits and a radioactively hot towel rail pumping out heat in the bathroom caused me to have a pretty bad night.

When I finally dragged myself out of bed at 6:30, Höxter was looking lovely in the sun. It made a big change after yesterday and I went a bit mad and decided to change my nutrition strategy. Rather than falling on the breakfast buffet like a pillaging Viking, I would have a light breakfast and eat along the way. It was going to be a shorter day and I thought I would try to enjoy it.

A light breakfast with my bean

Of course the gods of cycling laugh in the face of the hubris of attempting to enjoy a day cycling.

The only bridge in Höxter over the River Waser was completely closed for extensive repairs and neither my Garmin nor Google Maps seemed to be able to work out a way around this. I blindly struck out in a random direction following the river and after 10 km I found the next bridge. My Garmin unerringly directed me back to the point 75 m from where I started but on the other side of the bridge. That’s 20 km I didn’t expect to do and there was worse to come.

Almost immediately the roads began to climb. The lovely descent that I’d had yesterday had to be paid for and there were some long grinds at 3% and 4% on the tab but these climbs went well because I was feeling good and the weather was nice. I even shot a video of how nice it was.

A lot of Germany is like this

The second climb took me onto some beautiful logging tracks — all brand new tarmac — which also resulted some video footage. It’s very hard to capture what it’s like just cycling across Europe in still photos and maybe video is the way to go.

A lot of Germany is like this too

I saw my first sign of the Cold War which reminded me that I was riding through one of the most fortified borders in recent history. Within my lifetime, tanks performed war-game manoeuvres on these very roads and fields practicing for the day when the USSR rolled across the Elbe and we all turned into radioactive dust.

No idea what this means but maybe if I was driving a tank it would make sense

The day wore on and I started to feel hungry and, although the route took me through lots of little farming villages, there was absolutely nothing open. No cafes, no bakeries, no shops. As the hours passed I was getting awfully hungry and, indeed, so hungry that I was taking short 3k detours into other small villages which also didn’t have anything open. It had been five hours since my light breakfast with my hateful bean and any internal reserves I had left were running low.

Eventually, I arrived in Einbeck which appeared to be a retail big box wasteland but out of nowhere a lovely main square appeared and I got some food at a bakery.

No, I really do want two sandwiches..

It took a while to convince the person in the bakery — who was the first person I met in Germany who didn't speak excellent English — that I wanted both sandwiches.

My German is basically the following words

• Bremsstrahlung
• Eigenvector
• Gedankenexperiment
• Danke
• Ein grosse bier.

This limited vocabulary doesn’t really help when you’re trying to convince somebody that you want quite a lot of food.

After a lot of humiliating pointing and nodding I got both my sandwiches and felt a lot better. Out of Einbeck, I rolled along, musing on various things because at some point, pedalling on the flat just becomes automatic. Your mind wanders and you sort of get into a zone.

🎶The long and straight road🎶

Sometimes you are wondering about weighty matters like politics or science or finance but sometimes about why somebody would throw a used condom out of their car in the middle of nowhere. “Hans, why haven’t you thrown out that used condom?” “No idea Helga, it’s been on the dashboard of the BMW for a week. I’ll just flob it out of the window here in the middle of nowhere”. “Good plan”! And with such thoughts you don’t notice that the cycle lane is about to cross the road and…you get another graze on your knee as you hit a barrier.

I blame Hans and Helga.

I knew there was a final big climb 30 km from the end and so after a quick smash and grab at a garage for a Twix, I started up the climb. The first bit was a sustained 6-8% which is hard enough. This is the sort of gradient that you get for sustained periods during events like the Mallorca 312. It’s not easy — especially wrestling an angry hippo — but I can cope with it.

Then I saw the dreaded sign.

Bloody hell

15% for 2 km. Even without 750 km in my legs and without a kidney bean made from pure neutronium I would struggle up a 15% slope. I got into the lowest gear and out of the saddle. The bastard bean rocked around on the back, the bike creaked and groaned and I creaked and groaned. I completely emptied myself on the first kilometre but then I cracked. A spectral Carlton Kirby from GCN shouted in one ear “Kirk’s cracked. He’s pedalling squares. I think his day is done Sean”. Sean Kelly’s monotone droned in the other ear “He’s given a hundert percent and he’s been on the rivet for long enough. He’s majorly hurting here”. Finally…I walked the walk of shame up the last kilometre.

I tried to take a triumphant self-timer photo at the top but I misjudged how the iPhone timer worked. I think this premature photo gives a better impression of what I really felt like

Smile please

Even on the descent, I was finished and just freewheeled down trying to recover. Given the gradient on the other side, freewheeling was a 70 km/h white-knuckle ride but I was beyond caring. Let the bean of doom do its worst.

As an aside, I am a little obsessed with the whole “statistics” thing in cycling. I know my FTP — if you don’t know what this is, don’t worry — I know how my body responds to exercise: power, heart rate, cadence. I spend a lot of time looking at the various readouts on my Garmin head unit and I think I’m pretty well calibrated. Once I got to the bottom of the descent, all this stuff was out of the window. I can put out 900w in a sprint and 220w for 20 minutes normally but on a tiny 2% grade on the way into Goslar, I was struggling to put out 110w and my heart rate was low. Tired, spent, body not responding properly…just horrible.

Arriving at the hotel was a blessed relief and they put me in a room with a properly huge towel rail.

The best thing about today

Wandering around Goslar in a bit of a daze, I eventually found nice restaurant which does meat based main courses with potato based sides which is all I really need apart from beer.

Google Translate calls these “Grandma’s balls”. Tasty.

The route tomorrow is a bit unclear. The proper towns with hotels and restaurants are few and far between in this part of Germany and, although I was hoping to cross into the old GDR tomorrow, that would be a good 180-200 km which is a bit ambitious after today. So a short day of about 100 km to Staßfurt. Let’s hope that the bridges aren’t out. I think I might try to join the EV2 route again. It’s a bit longer (as usual) but I can potter along.