July 15th: London to Manchester Airport (with Train Transfer)

When I first bought my train tickets back to Manchester, I picked the 12:00pm departure for 2 reasons: first, I thought we could spend a little bit more time exploring London, and secondly, the checkin time for the hotel wasn't until after 3:00pm anyway. It couldn't be much later, since I still had to pack the bike into the box at the hotel after arrival. What I hadn't reckoned on was that London, like most tourist cities, starts quite late: nothing opens till 10:00am, and with a checkout at 11:00am, that didn't leave very much time for anything at all.

Bowen woke up quite early, so we had an early breakfast and I proposed we walk through Hyde Park and then visit the British Library when it opened at 9:30am. "Can we take the subway there?" Bowen had developed an obsession with subways, and would have spent all day riding the subways if he could have. Well, I wasn't going to spend all morning underground, so we took the subway to Hyde Park, walked across it, and then rode 2 subway lines back to the British Library, which was near where our hotel was.

The museum's worth a visit, though I paid the entry fee thinking it was for the library but was actually for the exhibit. The star of the library, which is the display of their notable collection is free! Nevertheless, we spent a good hour at the museum admiring artifacts like the Magna Carta, some of Da Vinci's original drawings, and original sheet music from famous composers. The old maps were also well worth the time.

Then it was time to check out and pack for the train. Our checkout was no hassle, and neither was the short half mile ride to the train station. Once there, I had enough time to get a refund for my Oyster card, and buy some snacks for the train. While waiting for the displays to update and tell us which platform to go to, a Virgin Trains representative found us and asked us which train we were waiting for. When we told them it was the 12:00pm to Manchester, they immediately told us the right platform so we could go to the platform and load our bike in advance of every one else! The entire experience was magical: we simply walked through the gates while the staff was cleaning the train. No tickets were checked, we found the bike car, unloaded the panniers, put the bike in, and then found our reserved seats. For 33 pounds, it was faster than a car would have been, cheaper, and more comfortable. It felt kind of funny doing in 2 hours by train what had taken us 9 days of cycling to do.

Once out of the train station on the other end, we turned on the navigation system and got a surprisingly pretty ride back to the Etrop Grange Hotel. Once there, we got our picture taken by a Hotel staff member. Bowen's first bike tour was completed!

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July 14th: Staines Upon Thames to London

The day before after I arrived, I'd asked our AirBnB host, who was a cyclist as well, what the best route into London was. He didn't actually know, so I showed him the two alternatives Google offered me. The northern route was shorter, and the southern route was longer, adding 22 minutes. He took one glance and said, "Oh, go through Richmond Park. That's got acres of real estate and will get rid of most of your annoying traffic." Of course, the next morning, those options had disappeared because Google thinks that under light traffic, an A road was preferable to a park!

Bowen had gotten up at 5am. I took the laundry and stuck it into the dryer but the dryer wasn't very effective. There was no chance I'd let the morning go to waste, and the Thames ride was going to be pretty anyway, so we backtracked through some of yesterday's ride and proceeded along the B roads towards London. While there was traffic, much of it was going the opposite way, so we were unstressed. At Bushy Park, we made the turn off and negotiated a gate into the park.

Once in the park it was a relief: no traffic whatsoever. At the fountain, however, Google wanted me to join the main road, when it was obvious that riding through the park was the right thing to do. Well, that caused me to turn off Google navigation and just follow my brain instead.

At the far end of the park, I asked other cyclists what the best way to London was. To my surprise, everyone said, "Oh, that's a long way." It was hard for me to keep from saying: "Look, we came all the way from Manchester. Even the street signs say 14 miles. That's no big deal at all!" After two or three useless replies, I was given directions by a teenager who said, "Follow this path, at the end of it there's a bridge, cross the bridge and turn right." This wasn't hard to follow, and when we got to the bridge the National Bike Route signs once again appeared, along with the incredibly tandem unfriendly bike infrastructure.

Once on the other side of the bridge, we followed the National Bike Route signs towards London, and were rewarded with a well marked path all the way to Richmond Park, whereupon we started to feel sprinkling of water on our faces. It never got much worse than that, though --- it wasn't even worth putting on rain jackets for that!

On the other side of Richmond Park, things got a little bit more suburban, and I turned Google navigation back on. Google navigation (via the Wahoo Elemnt app/head unit) actually does a decent job in cities and other populated areas. In any case, I could still follow the National Bike Route signs. I was expecting things to get more unpleasant and suburban, but they were mostly quite nice until we crossed the Hammersmith bridge with 4 miles to go until our hotel.

Once across the bridge, we were in London proper, and Google routed us into a series of busier and busier streets until we were mixing it up on Euston Road with double-decker buses and myriad car traffic. There were markings indicating that we were allowed to use the bus lane, so that's what we did. It was still stressful after all the country riding we did, but we eventually made it to Cartwright Gardens and checked into Studios2Let.

Well, we were actually too early to check-in, but they were happy to let us leave our bags and bike at the hotel while we went to explore the town. The first order of business was to walk to the London Euston train station where we had a snack and then picked up our train tickets for the next day. We found a Virgin Trains representative who explained how we were to find the correct platform and to board the train. Then we went to the visitor center for an Oyster card, and while we were at it, bought tickets for the London Eye. We got instructions to take the bus to 221B Baker street and then the subway to the London Eye. We opted out of Madame Tussauds and other experiences that felt more like theme park attractions than a true London experience.

The 221B Baker Street Sherlock Holmes museum. I was unprepared for how long the line was, but having been to the one in Meiringen, I had to complete the set. Once inside, it was very well done, with replicas of Holmes and Watson's study, and even wax figures of some of the events and people in the stories. Bowen was quite bored, but I promised that we'd visit the London Eye and then London Bridge after that.

At the London Eye, I was dismayed that we had to go to the ticket counter to exchange our vouchers for tickets. Once there, I discovered that you could pay  $10/person for "fast track" access, and also add a river cruise for $6.50. Since we were going to be in London for just one day, we opted for Fast Track and also picked the river cruise. The Eye came with a 4D experience that was short but worth the time.

The view from the London Eye was spectacular. The ferris wheel moved very slowly, so we had a hard time even being able to tell that we were moving. Getting on and off was quite a scramble, but once off we could move straight on to the river cruise.

From the river cruise boat, we got a nice tour of the buildings along the Thames, and when we saw Tower Bridge, I asked Bowen if he'd like to see it, and the answer was "Yes!" So once we disembarked, we headed straight for it.

One of the coolest thing about the Tower Bridge was that we got there just as the bridge was being raised to allow a ship through. Then there were the glass walkways, the animated film of the bridge being built, and the engine room exhibits. Best of all: no lines! Bowen enjoyed the engine room quite a bit, but by the time we were done with the tour he was too tired to walk, so I had to carry him back to the subway station. Since he was up at 5:00am, the best thing was to buy supermarket stuff to make dinner back at the studio, and then have an early night. So we bought Spaghetti, Lagsane, Eggs, and Salad and headed back.

Once at the studio, we were given the keys, and to our surprise were shown to an apartment right next to Mabel's Tavern! One snafu we encountered was that my handlebar bag had been place elsewhere than the usual place for bags, and the staff could not find it. I remembered the closet the staff had shoved it into, and dug through it and found it! Fortunately, the tavern turned out not to be too noisy. We had our dinner and bath and went to bed happy not to have to do laundry.

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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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