Bike touring through the United Kingdom

This piece is a continuation of part one here. The story picks up again at The Three Blackbirds Pub in Woodditton, a village in England that was once my home.

Time’s slow advance on Woodditton

09/21/24

I took a table out in front of the pub and soon saw a mid-aughts gray BMW convertible pull into the driveway. It was unmistakably Oliver, one of my oldest friends. He wore a baseball cap, black Ray-Bans and big grin. He waved and I just laughed. It was such a sporty-looking car and I wasn’t expecting it. It stood out from the fuel-efficient and tiny vehicles that you see everywhere on British roads. I remembered that Oli has always had a penchant for cars and old things and collects them regardless of their practicality. He later showed me his three-wheeled Reliant Robin which sits next to his parents’ house in Burwell on cinder blocks, gathering moss and thickets of cobwebs on the seats. When I last saw him in 2013, he was driving a green 1971 MG coupe which he maintained at great expense.

We brought out a couple pints and summarized the past eleven years of our lives. As Oli spoke, I studied his face. He had the same mannerisms and humor he’d always carried. A stream of conversational invention and cheekiness that made me bust out laughing all the time as a kid and again as an adult.

We’re still young, aren’t we? I thought to myself as our words wandered.

We spoke in the vocabulary of the intervening years. The pandemic, Donald Trump, and all of those things that bleed across the Atlantic and remind you how culture is borderless.

We touched on my marriage a few years back, Oli’s home purchase in Cambridge with his partner, Michaela. We covered remote work and instructing students through anti-contagion plastic barriers. Oli works as a music teacher now and plays guitar in a rotation of bands on the Cambridge scene.

We finally looked down to find our glasses empty, so we decided to go for a walk and revisit our childhood haunts.

We moved past the patch of land where there used to be chicken coops. The lot is still there, but the chickens are gone. Then by the old beige water tower, which looks haggard and mildewy these days. I remember when gales would roll in and the wind would wail against the structure like a wounded animal. That howl always made me feel uneasy, especially on those dark Sunday nights when I had to wheel the garbage cans to the collection point down the dirt road that ran by the tower.

As kids, one of our favorite pastimes was venturing into Devil’s Ditch. It’s a Saxon-era earthwork that historians think was used for some kind of defensive purpose. Possibly a bulwark against the Danes over a thousand years ago. There’s a trail running the length of Devil’s Ditch that begins in Woodditton and ends seven miles later in a town called Reach. It crosses behind my old house, and it’s how I met Oliver.

I was seven when we moved to England in 1999. He was on a walk with his grandmother, Jill, along the footpath. My mom, who happened to be in the back garden, flagged them down and introduced us, eager for me to have friends. The transient Air Force life is tough on the children of airmen—I’d just been uprooted from the small group of buddies I’d built in our former neighborhood in Virginia. But Oli and I hit it off immediately.

There’s a fence separating the yard and the public path now. As we walked by I wondered absently how many potential little friendships would be scuttled by the divider.

I peered over the top. The house itself seemed much more upscale than when we lived there. Land Rovers in the carport. Oli found the rental listing on his phone and I tried hard to recognize the renovated rooms. The interior looked well done, modern, unfamiliar.

The old junk pile that Nigel, our landlord, used to keep behind the carport is whittled down, but some of it remains. It used to be full of old timber that he salvaged from some big windstorm back in the 80s, covered by a dirty yellow tarpaulin. There were concrete mixers and rusted tractors. Oli and I used to rifle through it and see if we could use any of it for our hideouts in the woods.

We strolled out into the wheat field beyond the house and visited our fort in an old oak tree. Rows of nails once meant for hand and footholds are still embedded in the trunk, slowly being overtaken by bark. I attempted to climb up but the holds were so shortened I couldn’t make it.

We went by the big pond, another of our favorite hangouts. I was never sure if it was created intentionally or just a byproduct of the runoff from the wheat field. But we loved that place. It felt secret; infused with magic. Sometimes we’d wear wellingtons and tromp through the bog of the pond itself if the water was low.

We attempted to navigate our way through the brambles into the small clearing next to the water. Oli got stung by nettles just like old times. But we saw that lily pads had grown in the center of the pond and sprouted large, colorful flowers.

We continued on past the paddocks where, as a seven year old, I would shock myself on the electrified fence while trying to pet horses.

Very little of these scenes had changed for twenty-five years. Only, it all seemed so much closer to my old house than we remembered.

Oli and I were roleplaying our childhoods. We grabbed some thin, reedy sticks in Devil’s Ditch and used these to clear nettles from our paths, slicing their evil stalks in big whacks as we used to.

As kids, we’d cut these same sticks into spears or bend them into bows with fishing line. We were very warlike. Always on the lookout for “the boys from Stetchworth,” who we fashioned as our sworn enemies. I’m not certain we ever met anyone from Stetchworth, but we liked the idea of a pernicious foreign power. It made all of our defenses feel purposeful and urgent.

We wandered back to Oliver’s car at The Three Blackbirds and he sped us through the tiny country roads outside the village. He navigated using the old GPS screen in the center console which relied on location data stored on a DVD.

We stopped in for a pint at the Affleck Arms, one of his favorites, in Dalham —an adorable village of flint-walled cottages and climbing roses to the northeast of Woodditton. We whiled away another hour or two in the pub’s garden, the afternoon sun softening into shade as we savored pulls of cask ale. We chatted more about life and about nothing, watching regulars come and go.

After a pitstop at Waitrose for supplies, we returned to Oli's house in Cambridge, where Michaela and her Hungarian friend Dori were preparing dinner. Michaela is from Czechia. The kitchen filled with conversation in a medley of accents - Michaela's Czech lilt, Dori's Hungarian cadence, Oli's Suffolk clip, and my Western American inflection.

I'd picked up some pilsener at Waitrose and, before our meal, decided to demonstrate the cherished American tradition of shotgunning beer. I stabbed the can with a key and immediately doused my tee shirt with sticky lager. Oli gave it a try and was more successful. Michaela and Dori just shook their heads.

The evening spun on like one of Oli's old records. Over Uno cards and brews, he began unveiling his thrift store treasures. A bass recorder that he used to cover “My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion, and a typewriter he used to type out insults to Dori who had won Uno several times in a row.

When I mentioned I’d gone to the Targhee Bluegrass Festival near Driggs in Idaho, he disappeared and returned waving some bluegrass vinyl, which then twanged around the living room.

We switched to the auxiliary and Michaela introduced me to Kneecap, an Irish rap group that would become the soundtrack to my rest of my UK bike rides. I liked the song “H.O.O.D.”

Before I knew it, it was 3:00am. I crashed on the couch and thought a little regretfully of my paid room at the Blackbirds.

Time’s march on Newmarket

09/22/24

Oli and Michaela drove me back to Woodditton through a classic English morning—overcast and close, the kind that wraps around you like wet wool. We were all a bit hungover and bleary. Rain drizzled now and again, dappling the windshield.

We met up with Rob, one of my best friends from primary and middle school, around noon back at The Three Blackbirds. He rolled up and parked out back in the gravel lot by the barn, where my bike had the whole room to itself.

After a bear hug, the first thing I noticed about Rob was that he was thick with muscle. As kids at St. Louis Primary we were rail thin. But after university, he’d become an avid weightlifter.

Since it was about noon (and I was technically on vacation), I suggested we grab a table out front with a Guinness and catch up. Oli and Rob knew each other but hadn’t connected since I was in England in 2013. There seems to be just one or two degrees of separation between everyone in East Anglia. Oli’s mother used to babysit Rob. He and Oli played together as toddlers. But Oli went to a different school and so they moved in separate circles as we grew up. Hanging out around my house in Woodditton was often the bridge between. Now it was the Blackbirds.

Rob and I were close throughout school and we had a little crew with Ed (who I met up with in Brixton), Callum, Tom and others who hailed from Newmarket.

After finishing up, we said farewell to Oli and Michaela and Rob and I loaded in his car. He drove me by Granary Estates, which is adjacent to Woodditton. It’s the wedding venue where he’d married Rebecca, the lovely girl he was dating when I visited during university. They have a little son now named Charlie.

Rob pointed out the places on the grounds where the events took place: The banquet hall, the cottages where they stayed. He showed me pictures of it all on his phone and I felt a sharp pang of guilt for not having been there. A casualty of the distance and the time that’d passed since we’d seen each other.

Surrounded by these familiar places in East Anglia, I was overcome by a mix of elation and loss—excitement at seeing the old scenes and people, but also the sadness of knowing it’s impossible to be fully present for two far-flung and distinct groups of friends as they move through life’s milestones. I felt my competing identities more strongly than I had in years: The one rooted in the American West, the other in the English East.

We continued on into Newmarket, parked next to the bungalow belonging to Rob's dad on New Cheveley Road and walked around the town.

While Woodditton seems to be increasingly fancy, Newmarket feels grungier than I remember, with sports betting shops like Betfred and Paddy Power taking over High Street.

We meandered through The Guineas, which is a mall that used to be called The Rookery when I was a kid. Many storefronts stood empty, the mall seemingly suffering the same decline as its American counterparts.

But the place still hit me with powerful recollections. I remembered waiting for our double-decker bus at the station outside. Every day, it took us to St. Louis Middle School in Bury St. Edmunds—now closed since 2013. My mom would pick me up on our return at The Rookery at each day and she always had a treat for me and my sister. I went through a phase of loving chocolate-covered Turkish Delight, which I’m certain I’d find revolting today. It had a fragrant, perfumy taste.

Since it was across the street, we poked our heads into St. Etheldreda Catholic Church. Again, a surge of memory. Smells are the quickest way to transport yourself to another time. Something about the mixture of incense on the air and the particular mustiness of the building. My sister’s and my first communion had been here. I was an altar boy for countless masses here. My mother read scripture at that lectern.

As we wandered into the empty church, a priestly-looking figure emerged from the sacristy. He walked up to us and said hello. I mentioned that my family would come here each Sunday for years and hoped this would kindle some recognition. But he merely nodded, and a bit impatiently. He was polite but clearly wanted us gone so he could lock up. They’d just finished some kind of event after the day’s mass and the man looked tired.

We couldn’t finish our exploration of Newmarket without going by St. Louis Primary (it now goes by the posh title of “St. Louis Catholic Academy”), where Rob and I met. Suffolk County had for some reason decided to abolish all middle schools and combine the lower years into the primary schools and the higher years into the upper schools. Because of this influx of population, St. Louis had to expand.

We stood outside the low brick wall and looked at the old Victorian house which was the main part of the school back in our day. To the left of it, a large new building occupied a chunk of the former green space where we used to play.

Rob and I headed back to High Street and grabbed burgers at Hmmburger. These were a rough approximation of something you might find in the US. More of a pub burger with cheddar than a classic smash with American cheese, but good nonetheless.

Rob dropped me off later back at The Three Blackbirds.

I sat down for dinner and I was blown away by the high quality of the food. I ordered a Sunday roast with Yorkshire pudding, thick brown gravy, roasted potatoes and Brussels sprouts.

As I was settling my bill and getting ready to return to my room, the young server asked where I was from. I thought for a second. “Well, here pretty much.” I recapped my Air Force childhood story. “… and also Idaho,” I said, “in the US.”

“Oh, isn’t that the boring part?” she asked.

Aimless in Anglesey

09/23/24- 09/27/24

My second night at the Blackbirds, or the first night I stayed there, was hot in spite of the rain. The UK is ordinarily a place of damp chill and steaming mugs of Yorkshire tea. So my room had no counter for the unusually warm spell hanging over the countryside. I opened the window and listened to the droplets patter down while bugs and humidity flowed in through the screenless gap. Gradually, I drifted off to sleep.

When I woke there was a mist overhanging the fields outside my window. The mildewy Woodditton water tower was partially obscured. A moderate rain still fell.

I breathed the air through the window and tried to file away the village's distinctive smell of wet grass, elderflower, nettle, and muddy horse paddocks.

Today was the day I traveled to Wales and I was reluctant to get going. I wasn’t totally sure why I’d planned to leave East Anglia. This would be the final time I’d see my old village for who knows how long. Maybe on some future trip here with Fiona. I felt like I wanted to marinate in Woodditton, alone, for a while longer, but I had a train to catch.

I gorged myself on an English breakfast, returned to my room, and then reattached my panniers to the bike frame. I set off in my rain jacket and hoped the tires could grip the slick road.

At Newmarket train station, the pickup was as abbreviated as the dropoff. I rushed to pull my bike aboard and secure it before the conductor slammed the doors shut and the train shot off.

We arrived in Cambridge where I changed to a line headed to Birmingham. It was about two and half hours slightly north and west. I watched the waterlogged countryside roll by until I started to see the graffitied and defunct brick factory buildings from Birmingham’s boom during the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Birmingham New Street station has a bustling, airport-like atmosphere. I didn’t realize that train stations could have so many shops and amenities. There were even private lounges for first class passengers, of which I was not one.

I continued on to Llandudno Junction, the train station at the start of the ride I had planned around the isle of Anglesey. I was attracted to this part of Wales because of the many rave reviews from cyclists about the quiet roads and beautiful countryside. On the map, Anglesey is a national “Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty" a descriptor that always plays in my head in a British accent.

Another factor in coming here was that I wanted to see Rob’s mother, Angie, who moved to the town of Ruthin about ten years ago. When we were kids our families were very close and I’d be over at Angie’s house in Newmarket all the time. She’d cook us all kinds of things: Chips, sausages or desserts like Angel Delight.

The thing was, I had absolutely no idea what to do in any of these places in northern Wales other than pedal around on my bike.

When I arrived in Llandudno (pronounced “clan-did-noh” I’m told, though I heard many different variations), I found a Victorian coastal town with not much going on. But it was pretty and I’m a sucker for the moody weather on the coast.

The one notable culinary experience I had in Llandudno was eating the meat pie at a pub called The Cottage Loaf. It was superb, especially paired with a couple beers from Conwy Brewing.

I overnighted in Llandudno Hostel which was cheap enough that I opted for a private room. Very basic, but comfortable and quiet. I ate a five quid breakfast at Molly’s Cafe and then hit the local Tesco for supplies (candy bars, Lucozade, and a knockoff version of Gu energy gels) for the long road ahead. My goal was to ride a 100 mile loop around the island over about three full days, so I needed to average around 30 or so miles per day.

My first stop was Beaumaris, about 27 miles. I found this kind of daily distance to be about right, because you can actually afford the time to do the “touring” part of bike touring. When you get above 50 or 60 miles in a day, it becomes all about the cycling.

I crossed the bridge from Llandudno to Conwy and toured the castle overlooking the river. Conwy Castle was part of a network of fortifications built by Edward I during his conquest of the northwest part of Wales between 1277 and 1283. It stands watch over the medieval town, which is still enclosed by ancient walls. I found it incredibly cozy, like Hogsmeade in the Harry Potter books. Tiny streets with stone cottages, half-timbered buildings, and slate-roofed houses. Pubs that emanated warmth. I wished I'd stayed here instead of my hostel the night before.

I exited through one of the old gates on Bangor Road.

As I cycled into the town of Beaumaris I was hit by a rain squall and thoroughly soaked. I had no idea where I was going to stay. I chained up my bike and ducked into a pub called the Bold Arms to warm up. While eating an okay chicken wrap, I booked a hotel on my phone called Castle Court, directly across from Beaumaris Castle.

The castle is a marvel. The Platonic ideal. Two concentric stone walls, massive gates, a wide moat, eighteen circular stone towers, and two large gatehouses. The structure has a very pleasing symmetry.

I didn’t realize the place closed for tours at 4:00pm and I squeezed in during the final 45 minutes of the day. There was no one else there, which was magical and a little eerie. Strutting about the walls, I tried to figure out what the structures were. I love old castles, but they’re often stripped down, whatever traces of their original human occupants removed. No artifacts left out in the open to give you many clues.

I did dinner at a tapas place on Castle Street and returned to my hotel around 7:00pm or so. I overheard a guy at the hotel bar who sounded like he had a blended American and English accent. We struck up conversation. He was from Wales originally but now lived in Las Vegas. We chatted about life in the States and two other Welsh guys and the bartender joined in. They were curious about me and what the hell an American on a bike was doing all the way out here. The bartender was a twenty-something student who was studying zoology in Bangor. They bought me rounds of drinks and I smoked a cigarette with them in the beer garden out back. The topics of discussion ranged. The crew really wanted to engage in US politics but I didn't and I deflected as best I could. I stood and listened while they explained all of the positives and negatives of the American healthcare system to me.

I woke at 9:30am, two hours later than I'd intended, with a splitting headache. I think I was up until 1:00am with my Welsh comrades downing pints. At breakfast, I pleaded with the hotel staff to refill the coffee carafe (twice). I felt slow and stupid.

I’d resolved the day before to bike all 50 miles of my coastal route to Holyhead today. Since I wanted to be back in Cambridge that Friday evening to see Oli play a show on Saturday, I had to get some miles behind me to complete my circuit around the island in time.

Starting a long ride uphill while very hungover is a deeply unenjoyable experience. The route toward Red Wharf Bay, one of my checkpoints, takes you up Wexham Street to leave Beaumaris. The angle of the road tilts back for a while. I had to pause a moment when the pavement flattened out to let a bout of nausea pass.

But it’s funny how cardio almost always burns away the bad feelings. By the time I’d hit the beach marking Red Wharf Bay, I felt right as rain. Only, I’d encountered one of those odd routing choices from the Komoot app and the path I attempted to follow got lost in sand dunes and bogs. I had to haul my loaded bike on my shoulder over small rivulets that drained their way to the ocean. I’d intended to cycle what I thought was a boardwalk that ran along the bay, but it didn’t seem to exist.

I finally found an exit from the beach and started my way up the tiny road. I cursed my luck when I ran into a large garbage truck that left me no room to pass by on the bike. As I pressed myself into the hedge on the left to let the truck through, my leg was annihilated by stinging nettles.

But I began to find myself in the open and scenic country I’d read about. I passed small collections of stone houses, enormous herds of cattle and pigs. I bathed in the emerald landscape that stretched on and on. The air was fresh and tasted of fog. It was damp but the weather never intensified into a downpour that day.

Traffic on the roads became mellow, although I still feared how fast drivers would scream around the blind corners where the view was blocked by hedgerows. One item I’d recommend to anyone doing something similar is a rear-facing bike radar. The one I have from Garmin pulses out an intensely bright light with increasing frequency relative to the proximity of an oncoming car. I think it saved my bacon a couple times.

Perhaps it was where I stayed, but I thought Holyhead, where I found myself that evening, was a dive. There wasn’t much in the way of good food and the whole town had a rundown kind of feel to it. I sat in a pub called the Holland Inn and watched a troupe of boys in their early twenties stomp in, reeking of weed. The no-bullshit lady pulling taps seemed to know them and dressed them down for the smell. She came out from behind the bar and sprayed them all down the British equivalent to Febreze.

I happened on a monument in the middle of town dedicated to Welsh soldiers from Holyhead who lost their lives in World War II and the Falklands War.

I’m part-Welsh by heritage, and I noted that ten of the seventy names on the list of those killed in action in the Second World War had the surname of Roberts. But where these men sit in my family tree I have no idea.

For dinner, I bought a cheap kebab and retired to my room at the Travelodge which was lit with an oppressive fluorescent light like a dentist’s office.

I felt sad here in this cold and remote town. I missed Fiona and my friends back in East Anglia.

I did breakfast at a spot on Stanley Street called Reuben’s Cafe, which puts on good strong coffee. I was excited to move on. My journey today back to Menai Bridge, at the entrance to Anglesey, was 31 miles.

It took me just a few hours to get there and I dropped off my panniers in my tiny room at the Carreg Bran hotel in the delightfully-named settlement of Llanfairpwllgwyngyll next to the town of Menai Bridge. I’d completed my hundred mile loop in a bit of a rush, but now I had time to kill.

It was somewhere around noon, so I cycled over to town and floated between pubs for hours. I was bored and tried to write, but it didn’t come easy.

My favorite establishment was the Victoria Hotel. Had I been feeling a bit more splurgy, this would’ve been the spot I’d chosen to overnight. The downstairs bar is welcoming with comfortable green felt chairs and warm wood paneling. It had been gorgeously remodeled. The rooms looked similarly well-appointed online.

It rained and rained and rained outside. Small streams ran down the streets.

But I was thankful when dinner time arrived, though I had to cycle through the muckiness, so I could return to the Carreg Bran, eat, and go to sleep. I had a squeaky metal-framed single bed, but otherwise the room was silent and I slept for nine hours.

I wolfed my breakfast and pedaled to the train station in Bangor where I caught a train to Rhyl to see Angie. We chose that spot because it’s the closest point on the coastal train line to Ruthin, which is about thirty minutes to the south by car.

Angie greeted me just outside the station and we hugged for a while. When I was a kid, she felt like a second mother and a lot of that ancient feeling, stored in some deep cavern in my mind, came flooding back.

She commented that she didn’t know too much about where to go for a bite and coffee around Rhyl. In her opinion it was generally a town to be avoided. A bit dodgy.

We ultimately did breakfast, my second for the day, at a Sainsbury’s. It was close to the station and I had to be back in a couple hours for another train to Birmingham. The food was so much better than a grocery store cafe had any right to be.

As I ate sausages and fried potatoes, we shared updates about our lives and those of each member of our families in turn.

It made me happy to learn that Angie had built a close-knit community in Ruthin, though I wasn’t surprised. She has a way of embracing people as her own—just as she did with me. I wondered how she’d developed such a deep well of kindness.

Angie drove me back to the station and we embraced again. Hopefully, we said, it wouldn’t be so long until the next time.

Part three.