July 13th: Hindhead to Staines Upon Thames

In the morning, I was happy to discover that the tingling from stinging nettles were gone! I cheerfuly made breakfast at the AirBnB, and as soon as we were ready, we started with a ride up back over to Gibbet Hill, where we found someone to take pictures of the two of us. Then following the directions, we rode down the other side. Once again, my GPS tried to take us off-road, but a query to a hiker corrected us and happily rode down the hill on pavement.

Near Thursley, we ran into a friendly cyclist who offered to take picture of the two of us while we were riding, which was great of him. He confirmed that we were on the right route, and we had a great time just rolling along and chatting. In Elstead we found a playground but Bowen didn't want to stop. But there was a major milestone: Bowen complained that his seat was too low! I raised it by 10mm, and he was much happier. He'd grown overnight!

The climb over the motorway was stiff and busy, but since most of the traffic was headed for the motorway, once we got over the hill the traffic magically disappeared. We still followed the recommended track and ended up on a single track hiking path that nevertheless did not devolve into mud or stinging needles. Past the bike path, we rode on a series of A roads that had traffic but were slow enough that we could keep up. Just passt Worplesdon, we found a bakery that had a line leading out the door. That was a sure sign that it was good, so we stopped the bike and got into line. The line moved surprisingly fast for such a small shop. After we got lunch I asked about a place to have a picnic, and the staff suggested the place right around the roundabout which turned out to be Fox Corner.

It was a great place for a picnic, with no picnic benches but logs to sit on and no one seemed to use it, so it was super clean. We'd been lucky on every picnic so far on this trip, and today was no exception. It was the last picnic of the trip.

Past Fox's corner the road climbed a bit and wound through some suburban bits. Then I heard a clatter and Bowen said: "My pedal fell off!" Indeed it had. I stopped the bike, had Bowen get off, and then walked back to get his pedal, which had landed in the middle of the road where no cars had run over it. With the small pedal wrench we brought from home (as part of the S&S coupler wrench), I hadn't dared to over tighten the pedals for fear I couldn't get them off, but I had obviously not tightened one of the pedals enough!  Now I was happy we had a pedal wrench in the bag. After a bit of tightening we were done and rode on, landing onto the Basingstoke Canal Towpath. Like the other towpaths we'd had the fortune to ride next to, it was quiet, narrow, had random grade changes which caused Bowen to scream in delight, and nicely quiet, though still more traffic'd than the one in Worcester. In the town of Woking, the Canal path went right next to the town playground, which had a zipline.

The towpath ended a couple of miles after the playground, but rather than terminating in a road, it terminated in the middle of the River Wey navigation path! The transition was not smooth, with a ramp that was not bikeable on the tandem

!

The River Wey path was clearly not as well maintained as the Basingstoke Canal, but we weren't on it for long anyway, since we meant to exit so as to ride alongside the Thames for our entry into Staines. All along the canals, I'd explained to Bowen what the canal locks were, so when we came along the Thames canal lock in operation we stopped the bike and watched 3 boats traverse the canal locks!

The entire process from end to end took about 20 minutes, and Bowen got bored towards the end as nothing seemed to happen whenever water was draining from the canal locks, but he could at least see what a Canal lock was for. Boating along a canal didn't seem very much fun to me --- the boats have to be narrow, and you had restricted maneuverability and couldn't go wherever you wanted. But if the canal happened to go where you wanted to go anyway, I could see that it was a bit like having an RV.

The ride into Staines felt like entering a resort: the bike path was finally wide and paved without traffic, and we saw plenty of walkers and cyclists. We exited the bike path past a church and rode to the train station. Confusing 55B with 558, we fumbled around looking for our AirBnB until I called our host and he magically appeared from the house we were right in front of!

Staines was a full service town and it was about 3:30pm when we arrived. We settled in, then walked downtown to the Mark & Spencer and bought dinner (Pizza, salad, and fruit) to cook and eat at the AirBnB, which had a great kitchen. It was still early when we were done, so we walked 10 minutes to the community swimming pool and went swimming! Unfortunately, after the session I tore my swim suit by accident, but it was the end of the trip so I just dumped it and lightened our load for our last couple of days of riding. This truly was the "tour of the things left behind."

We did laundry in the evening. It was the last time we'd need to do laundry on the trip, so that was a milestone for me as well!

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July 12th: Reading to Hindhead

Over the past several days, I'd developed plenty of confidence in Komoot's bicycle routing. Sure, at times it would put us on a national bike route that did insane crazy things, but these were all signed national bike routes and I wouldn't have been able to do better. So when Komoot told us it was about 33 miles to Hindhead, we took it easy in the morning, saying goodbye to JF only at 10:00am.

Almost immediately, riding towards Wokingham, we encountered pretty serious mud on the bike trials. Most of them we could ride through, though of course with considerable wetness on the rims and chains. Well, I didn't build super strong wheels so I could baby them so we rode through as many as we could, though some of them required me to dismount and push through to remain confident that we wouldn't have a sudden muddy swim. All through the process Bowen was calm and composed.

In Blackwater, we stopped at a Tesco Extra for lunch. They featured a cafe with a kids meal deal, so I had fish and chips while Bowen had the chicken nuggets. When we came back outside to resume riding, however, we discovered that the front tire was flat. Extracting the inner tube and locating the corresponding hole in the tire, I dug out a piece of glass, no doubt picked up during all that wet riding. I used up my last patch patching the tube, again sticking in a new inner tube into the front tire. Not being willing to do without a patch kit, I went back into Tesco and discovered that yes, they sold patch kits! For one pound I got a brand new patch kit (with only 3 patches, but enough to get through the tour). We were back on the road.

The kicker came near Farnham, where Komoot demanded that we ride through a flooded tunnel. I balked at this and said, "We need to find a better way." Bowen rebutted, "What if it's the only way!" I backed out and made an attempt to route through what looked like a hiking trail in the woods, but that resulted in thigh high nettles, which hurt! To add insult to injury, when I abandoned the bike and carried Bowen on my shoulders to see if the route would go through at all, it dead ended in a boarded up bridge that wouldn't take the tandem! My lower legs would tingle for the rest of the day from all those scrapes from stinging nettles.

So we backtracked once again to the flooded tunnel. A group of cyclists passed us, but didn't stop to talk to us at all! It wasn't that they were going fast --- they were riding at bike path speeds. I hope I never become so jaded that I don't stop to talk to a father with a 5 year old son on a tandem who's obviously touring through the country. To my surprise, we rode through the tunnel with no problems at all, leaving the tunnel with wet rims and chains but dry knees. "I told you we could do it," said Bowen. It occurred to me then that maybe people become parents so that they can be heroes. There's no way your spouse would look up at you the way your 5 year old son does. I hoped that the day when my son discovers that I'm only human isn't too much of a let down for him. Looking at the map now on a big screen, I realized what I should have done was to ride to Farnham on the busy A road we had traverse (which looked huge and busy!) and then taken Tilford Road all the way to Hindhead. The traffic would have sucked, but it would have bypassed what was coming to us.

The ride from the flooded tunnel to Waverly was somewhat pretty, alongside the river Wey, redeeming Komoot's routing in my eyes again. The traffic was also very light and I enjoyed the riding, setting us up for another conflict when the GPS told us to take Greensand Way through the Hankley Common Golf Club rather than follow the road! In retrospect, the road would have been faster, and wasn't that much traffic, but we were not to know that the dirt detour would devolve into sand! We should have turned around at the first sign of sand, but by the time the thought occured to me we were in too deep. Bowen had to dismount while I pushed the bike for a good 15 minutes before we reached rideable ground. It didn't make me feel any better that there were signs saying: "MOD Training Ground: Unexploded Ordnance Potentially Present!" "This sucks," said Bowen. But he walked and didn't really whine. I was in awe: I know adults who would have whined all the way through the walking part, but my little adventurer was already more of a man than they were.

We finally got back onto the road and once again Komoot tried to get us to ride a dirt track. We stopped an equestrian and she told us to get back onto the road and follow it to the T-intersection and then turn left. In practice, we probably should have turned all the way around and turned right to climb over Gibbet Hill, but we didn't know that.

Once we got onto Tilford Road, the traffic increased, and the climbing started in earnest and never let up. In fact, it didn't let up until we got to Hindhead, our destination of the day. Once at Hindhead, I realized that the AirBnB address didn't have a street #, so I pulled out my bluetooth headset and called Kim, our hostess. She reminded me that in rural England, houses don't have numbers but have names, and kindly stayed on the phone until we found the house and opened the door.

Hindhead was the capstone of our trip: Bowen had long wanted to visit the real Gibbet Hill, and we lost no time in getting settled and then hiking back out to the Devil's Punch Bowl National Trust, and walking the 20 minutes to the Gibbet Hill Cross. Along the way, we met a cyclist who told us how to get out of the area without traversing the nasty stuff we did: ride on the Gibbet Hill bike path, descend the other side to Thursley and Elstead, and used the Puttenham road to get over the big motorway to minimize traffic. He also told us to look for the marker on the bike path telling us where the motor way tunnel running under Gibbet Hill was.

After all this build up, you would think that Gibbet Hill might be a let down, but Bowen was delighted by it. The visibility wasn't super great, but we could still see very far, and the area was indeed very pretty.

Dinner that night was at the local Nepalese restaurant. It was serviceable but not great. I'd booked the next night (our last free night) at Staines at a place with its own kitchen so we could cook and not have to eat out. In the evening, we finally met our hostess, who very graciously helped us with laundry, and not wishing to repeat the day we just had, I asked to borrow her computer with a large screen to plot the next day's route on Ridewithgps. She went so far as to call her sister who was an avid cycle tourist to see if she could share a route with us. Her sister recommended CycleStreets. Using Ridewithgps, however, I discovered that there was what looked like a canal bike path from Brookwood all the way to Addlestone, which beat anything CycleStreets suggested. I plotted several alternates in case this one wasn't good, and called it a night.

My legs tingled from all the stinging nettles, however, and no amount of hydrocortisone could stop that. I slept, hoping I would feel better in the morning.

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July 11th: Reading Rest Day

When I first thought about the trip, I thought we could just ride into Stratford Upon Avon during the trip and visit the tourist locations there. Then I realized that doing that would disrupt the tour too much and gave up on it. Well, we woke up to cloudy skies and a 100% chance of rain in the forecast, so I told JF we'd be staying another night, paying cash so AirBnB doesn't charge our cleaning fee twice, which would have happened if we made another reservation via the app.

I looked into taking the train from Reading to Stratford Upon Avon, but it was more expensive than renting a car and much slower. The car rental place was only 20 minutes walk from JF's place, so Bowen and I borrowed a backpack from him, put rain gear and the PS Vita into it, and walked over to pick up a Fiat 500. The route through the city took us past the Thames, and downtown, which even had a little street with an old brick building built on it.

It took a good couple of hours to drive to Anne Hathaway's cottage. (I didn't bother with trying to visit William Shakespeare's birthplace, because it turned out that no one actually knew where that was) I was surprised by how well the Fiat 500 handled even on the high speed motorway, and I was relieved that the stick shift was very easy to drive. The car even came with a USB plug and media integration, but I couldn't figure it out on the way there, so I used my bluetooth headset for navigation instead.

Anne Hathaway's cottage was very well done, with docents ready to explain to you what was period, and what was an addition. Intriguingly enough, Shakespeare only left her the second best bed in his will, leading some to speculate that he might have had a mistress. The docent explained however, that as the widow she would have had all the rights to one third of her husband's estate anyway, so giving her the marriage bed was not unusual as such. The grounds themselves were worth walking, and it hadn't started raining yet (though it did rain on our drive), but I'd received an SMS from JF that it was raining heavily in Reading, so we'd made the right choice to have a zero day.

After lunch, it started raining heavily in earnest, but I'd spotted on TripAdvisor that there was a kinetic museum, The MAD museum, which I thought Bowen would enjoy. Indeed, Bowen was happy to spend 2 hours there. The museum was tiny but well done, with a kids interactive section that could keep anyone there happy for hours.

JF had suggested that I do a common tour, which was Stratford Upon Avon, the Baths, and Stonehenge all in one day. The amount of driving seemed excessive, but Stonehenge was actually not all that far from Reading, so I figured I'd do the bit of extra driving and visit Stonehenge. I showed Bowen pictures of Stonehenge, but he didn't want to. Yet when we finally got there in the driving rain, he enthusiastically called it out and became excited. It was raining quite heavily, so we put on our rain gear and took the shuttle bus to the site instead of walking. After that, we visited the museum and then had a snack in the cafeteria before driving the car back to the return site.

We walked back from the car rental place back to JF's apartment, stopping to buy breakfast for the next day. With only 2 days of unreserved lodging left, I confirmed a reservation in Hindhead and started issuing queries for places to stay between Hindhead and London. I expected the next day to be an easy day, having had a rest day and a relatively short route, according to Komoot.

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July 10th: Oxford to Reading

You can't visit Oxford and not at least see the University grounds, so our first order of business was to ride to the University grounds and at least look at the grass. It was brown, indicating that they'd have a fairly dry summer so far, even though the forecast kept threatening rain!

My initial thought for the day was that we'd ride to Reading or Wokingham. When scouting out places to stay, I'd looked as far ahead as Sandhurst, but the forecast was calling for rain on the next day. While I wouldn't trust any long range forecast for weather in England, this one looked fairly solid. If it was going to rain, you want to be in a big city. If the weather was nice, however, country houses were usually cooler, quieter, cheaper, and much more bike friendly. Balanced against that was that Bowen was still obsessed with duck for dinner!

After leaving the University grounds, Komoot did a great job of routing us along side streets and even city parks to lead us out of town, but the at the science park dumped us right onto A4674, another unpleasant main road with a lousy sidepath. I looked on my device for alternates, but sure enough there was no alternative. I did spot a quieter alternate once we'd gotten to Dorchester on Thames, but Komoot was already planning to take us there, so we just bore with the noisy highway until we exited.

Near Wallingford, we resumed the noisy A road, but I spotted a bike route sign and grabbed it, riding into Wallingford at a side street. Once in Wallingford, Bowen said he was getting tired, so I asked an adult leader of a group of uniformed school kids if there was a city park. They directed me to it and Bowen happily played there for a good half hour before being ready on the bike. It was obvious that the day before had worn him out, so I confirmed a booking in Reading rather than Wokingham or any place further on. 

Past Wallingford, the bike route now took us into the Chiltern Cycleway, and became shaded and pretty throughout! At Checkerdon, Bowen started getting hungry, and we doubled back a bit looking for a signed village store only to be told that the store had been turned into a house! We were told to head over to Stoke Row for food, and given the choice between the bakery and the pub, Bowen went for the pub, the Cherry Tree Inn. The weather was a little windy but nice enough to eat outside, though the food was not great, with the pulled pork sandwich being too dry.

Having been so fortified, we finished the ride into Reading, which started behaving like an English cycle path once we got into the vicinity of the town: irrational twists and turns, terminating into a city park path that was gated by a staircase! "This is not tandem friendly! Hmph!" said Bowen in a huff. If only I had a video camera for that little remark --- he looked so cute as he said that!

We were a little too early for our AirBnB, but no matter: on the River Thames we found a playground with a Zipline!

It was very warm, and I was glad that we had put on sunscreen earlier in the day. When Bowen was done with the playground, we rode the last few minutes to the AirBnB, where our host, JF greeted us with surprise: "I didn't expect your son to be 5 years old!" We told him about our situation and he graciously agreed to let us decide the next day whether we were going to stay in Reading for 2 nights. I put Bowen through the shower quickly, and then we headed out to look for ice cream.

Reading had a huge downtown shopping mall full of stores, including many well known ones from the USA. We had ice cream and then Bowen decided he wanted to see the new Spiderman movie. We paid exorbitant English prices for the movie, and then Bowen wanted to walk out after an hour. I actually was enjoying the movie so I persuaded him to come back in with me after visiting the bathroom to finish watching the movie.

After the movie, we walked back, using the Tesco along the way to buy breakfast. Bowen suddenly needed to use a bathroom, and we stopped at Kings Chef, which was actually reviewed quite nicely on Google, so we bought takeout duck noodles, spicy fried rice (which turned out not to be very spicy), and string beans. On account of my speaking mandarin to the cashier, she threw in some spicy duck wings as well.

After dinner, Bowen was tired, and said he'd rather have a zero day the next day. I told him we were expecting rain anyway, so we would very likely stay 2 nights here. "Yippie!"

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July 9th: Winchcombe to Oxford

The morning took us past the entrance to the Sudeley Castle, which wasn't open for us to visit this early. Immediately past the castle, the road climbed steeply out of Winchcombe towards Guiting Wood and the village of Guiting Power (which wasn't actually a power plant!). The steep climb at grades in excess of 12-14% felt terrible, and I was mortified when we arrived at the top and I discovered that we had a rear flat tire!

All that riding on random dirt paths often lined with thorny plants must have taken its toll, for as I checked the tire casing, I found and dug up no less than 3 thorns from the tire. I found one hole in the tube and patched it, but had no confidence that I'd patched the only hole in the tube, so inserted one of my two brand-new-in-box spare tubes into the rear tire. While fixing the flat, a couple of cyclists rolled up and helpfully stopped to talk about the upcoming rest of the ride ("You've done the toughest hill in the Costwolds," they said.) and even help lift the rear of the frame so I could insert the rear wheel back in. I ran a few itineraries past them, and they said, "We think the Costwolds are way prettier than Oxford shire, so I think you should stop in Whitney, the last stop before entering Oxford Shire."

The Costwolds were pretty, and I'd picked the route we were on because Scarlet had ridden in them in the past and recommended that I visited Upper and Lower Slaughter, which were very pretty villages. The route while filled with climbing took us on mostly backroads and bike paths that were untraffic'd, and gave us vistas of the surrounds.

Upper Slaughter turned out to be nothing special, but the centre of Lower Slaughter was incredibly pretty, with a stream next to a mill, and a large wading pool with ice cream! At this point, I knew we were going to make Oxford or Witney that day, and first booked a hotel in Witney but after talking to the ice cream vendor changed to an Oxford AirBnB. Part of it was driven by Bowen's recent obsession with duck. After I told him that Witney's hotel had a swimming pool but no duck, while it would be possible to get good duck in Oxford, he opted for Oxford. I told him that this was not a decision we could reverse once we made the AirBnB reservation and he said he was OK with it.

We messed around with routes for a bit, having various wrong turns with Google Maps before switching over to Komoot for navigation. That route took us to Burton-Upon-Water for a picnic lunch  with our favorite pastries right next to the stream running through the town and the motor museum. You know the place is touristy when you start to see Asian tourists walking around with selfie-sticks. While the motor museum might have been interesting, we still had a fair distance to ride to Oxford, so I chose discretion and we got back on the bike right after lunch. The rest of the ride in the Costwolds were beautiful, and the Komoot provide route always chose to keep us on pretty bike paths and forest roads rather than the main A-road, but upon exiting the Costwolds at Minster Lovell, it dumped us onto a B road. We stopped at a petrol station for some quick snacks and rode on through Witney.

Past Witney, the route took us onto the A40, which had a sidepath that was officially designated a bike route. Unfortunately, English sidepaths along major motor ways are very neglected pieces of pavement, with lots of narrow traversals with overgrown bushes and other leafy plants to scratch you. The path is also inconsistent, occasionally switching from one side of the pavement to another for no reason whatsoever. The occasional relief when a buffer area was built between the bike path and the main road were far and few between. I contemplated stopping to try to find a better route but decided it was just easier to ride to Oxford as quickly as possible. In fact, once in Oxford on a Sunday, the roads were clear and reasonably empty. We found our AirBnB with no problem. Our host was a Chinese family that ran the only Korean restaurant in town. When they heard about Bowen's penchant for a duck dinner, they had no problem recommending a place, but it wasn't within walking distance, though cycling was easy. Well, the solution was to go eat before taking a bath that day.

We got to the restaurant at 5:00pm, and true to being a Chinese restaurant, they were happy to serve us dinner. We ordered lots of food and ate it all, having had the longest day of the trip so far. People often ask us if Bowen got tired after cycling all day, but the reality was, after we bought breakfast and dropped it off at the AirBnB, he was still so energized that he asked me to take him to the playground with a zipline that he had spotted on the way to dinner! I hadn't even noticed the zipline, but he'd seen it and of course I wouldn't break my promise to let him zipline whenever we saw a playground with one. He got no less than 20 runs on the zipline before other kids started lining up to use it as well. Having been spoiled by having ziplines on the trip all to himself, he shared a few times before going off to play with other toys in the playground. After the trip I would ask him which of the ziplines he liked best, and he would say "The one in Oxford."
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July 8th: Worcester to Winchcombe

After the crazy random elevation changes and single-track unpaved bike path of the previous day, I was delighted to discover that the bike path through Worcester used the old towpath along the Worcester-Birmingham Canal. These bike paths, while narrow and with several bridge traversals that required me to duck, never had insane grade changes, and were quiet and calm on a Saturday morning.

After reluctantly leaving the canal path, we stopped at the edge of Worcester where there was a nice playground which unfortunately did not have a zipline. It was also lonely and deserted on a Saturday morning, so Bowen didn't actually want to spend too much time there.

The actual on-road riding was on fairly small roads with relatively little traffic, taking us through towns such as Elmley Castle that while having signs for the castle didn't actually grant us any views of it! In the town of Pershore, we stopped to try to find a replacement sweat band, but couldn't find any. Near Ashton Under Hill, a group of cyclists caught us, including a girl on a trailer bike towed by her dad who was riding a bicycle with an electric assist. Bowen immediately sped up, which automatically meant that we had to ride with them and ignore our GPS route.

They were headed to a cafe in Winchcombe, so we joined them on a rolling hills ride. They had to slow down for us a bit, but they were very friendly and told us about the steam railway in Winchcombe which Bowen was sure to be interested in. This turned out to be the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Steam Railway, which was apparently the longest steam railway in England.  After lunch, I went to the hardware store and bought a tea-towel, intending to cut it up so that I could have a sweat band. It was big enough that I could make several! We were too early to check-in to the AirBnB, but Carol was nice enough to leave our bike and bags with them and even drove us to the station so we wouldn't miss the next train!

The steam train was pretty fun, including a stop where they had signal boxes which Bowen was happy to pull to make the flags move. We also got to ride in a rail car where you could see the driver steer the car. When the driver hit the end of the track, he'd actually remove the control sticks and move them to the opposite end of the car to start driving back!

That night, Bowen wanted duck again. After consulting with our hostess, I determined that the local Chinese restaurant would be terrible, so we went down to the high end supermarket and bought pre-marinated duck to bake in the AirBnB oven. We ate well, and it was fairly cheap, so it was a win-win all around.

The next day was a Sunday, which meant that we shouldn't have trouble finding lodging provided we exited the Costwolds. But to make sure, I sent several inquiries to a few AirBnB locations, and checked booking.com for alternatives in case we couldn't make Oxford. We had more choices than we needed, so I decided to make our decision after we got over the first several hills of the day to see how we felt the next day.

That evening, Carol gave us various children's books for Bowen to read. To my surprise, he picked the kids' abridged version of The Secret Garden and made me read it to him in one sitting before going to sleep.

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