It’s 11:00am on a Sunday and I’m drinking a mercifully cold beer in Brienne-le-Château’s Bar Centre, a faux-marble formica-covered spot covered in red iron crosses that I’m choosing to believe represent some whimsical chapter in French history. The men here are intense, graying and grizzled, clutching unlit cigarettes in their gnarled fingers and pacing back and forth between the Française des Jeux lotto machine and the horse races on TV.
I do not envy these horses and their sad, stupid legs.
After a punishing 50 miles on a particularly sweltering summer solstice, we’ve decided to take an extra day off in this sleepiest of sleepy towns, and with it, I’d like to commemorate the first ten days of this fresh hell with a few things I’ve learned along the way:
- I probably should have trained more;
- I probably should be drinking less;
- I probably should be sleeping more;
- I probably should be spending less;
- I probably should be eating, more or less.
With that out of the way, let us begin by recapping the first two days of discovery. Okay. You start. No, go ahead. Okay, I’ll go.
The Arrival: 1 Camden Stout & 4 Naan (that’s insane)
After my middle seat transatlantic flight, I land at Heathrow at dawn, expected to somehow figure out how to reassemble a bike in an airport; after about two hours of littering the baggage claim with my sweat, the deed is complete.
An agent tells me that the only way to leave the airport with a bike is via taxi, and every taxi driver refuses to accept my cargo; Mark texts me that his flight has been delayed and he doesn’t know when he’ll arrive.
And yet!
I, quite heroically, am too tired to freak out or muster up a plan, instead smuggling myself onto a train then pissing myself slightly upon my polite scolding by the station agent at Paddington Station.
As Tom Cruise said: “Mission Accomplished!”
Walking through Hyde Park, presumably the poshest side of London, I find a young, mustachioed, miserable bike mechanic who agrees to let me inflate my tires but is far too busy to so much as look at my bike, given that his colleague has called in sick and he hates this neighborhood and everyone who lives in it.
“Well, you’re carrying a lot of shit,” he snarks out of the side of his mouth, sipping his tea. I am?? He then launches into a political rant about how my country has poisoned the world with its capitalism. “I shouldn’t be talking like this around here. I fockin hate this bloody neighborhood.” (note: do Britons even use the word “neighborhood”? Perhaps I have invented this interaction.)
Biking through Hyde Park with blazing speed, I narrowly missing a parked Porsche with the pannier bags I borrowed from Ian, and very nearly decide to quit the whole trip right then and there.
Soldiering on, I’m rewarded with a rainy 40 minute, wrong-side-of-the-road ride through Buckminister Alley and Large Tony and Tate Cathedral and all the rest of this city’s heavy-hitting sights before finally reaching my destination: Clapham Common.
Clapham Common, for those uninitiated, is a large urban park and Victorian-era music venue where famed English guitarist Brian May first performed magic for his mother, George, and Benjamin Franklin was arrested for public urination (unconfirmed legend has it that he was not circumsised but that he did have a rather large and oft-infected ivory Prince Albert with ‘I’m da Boss’ etched into its side).
Here in this park, slowly eaten alive by gnats (or do you call them midges, England?), I try to close my eyes on a park bench for a bit, only to be interrupted by do-gooders who insist on asking me, “y’alright, mate?”
No, mate, I’m not: the awake has become a source of physical pain, one requiring 4 coffees at a nearby cafe which, incidentally, has no public bathroom.
Biking carefully to The Northcote, I cooly order a half pint of bitter, and do my best to explain my predicament to a muscular Irish bartender. “What,” she asks loudly in front of the business-casual crowd, “you need to take a poo?” She ushers me to my own private bathroom, offering to watch my bags with the wink of a gal who knows what’s about to go down (the drain), and just like that, customs laws be damned, I officially have smuggle a bundle of American produce into the aquatic subterranean underbelly of the United Kingdom of England.
(my first, I’ll add, as a full-time bicyclist).
By evening, I meet my cousin! for a few pints next door at Northcote Records, a sufficiently hip Battersea bar with false concert posters on the wall, 2-for-1 cocktail specials, and outdoor seating in this sufficiently hip neighborhood.
Dehydrated and moderately boozed-up, we’re then joined by my other cousin (otherwise known as his sister)! for some high-style Indian cuisine generously funded by my aunt and uncle (otherwise known as their parents) in what marks our first time hanging out without our respective parents around.
[I must say, as the eldest and least dignified of the group, it is profoundly satisfying to witness these children-turned adults in their natural habitat, to learn of their lives as fully-formed, intelligent, accomplished humans who find themselves at home in and in love with their city.]
Saying farewell to these two, to the reasonably familiar, and to the enviable sense of home they’ve carved for themselves: surprisingly difficult, emotional, bittersweet. Still, onward I must go, and, yes, onward I do go.
Day 1: Cockles & Real Ale
It’s another long, gray ride into town, and I’m already feeling the weight on the back of my bike, but after only a few wrong turns—nary but a wiggle here nor a waggle there, guv’nor, says no one who exists on this plane of existance—my rig rolls into the station of Southwark Cathedral to Shmark looking shmarkly as ever, having made his arrival on time. A miracle!
Our hug is extremely brief and masculine, and after a brief “slash” in the cathedral cafe (this means pee-pee, I believe, which itself means wee-wee, which itself means urination), we buy a single pilgrim passport from the gift shop for the staggering price of £10 because Mark doesn’t have one. And, after a hot beverage extracted from the ripened and roasted and shredded cherries of the coffea tree at a local establishment that serves such things, we make our bicycles move with our feet and legs spinning in circles.
During our preliminary discussions, we had discussed a target of 25 miles per day, as I’m a person who has never biked so much in a single sitting. And what do you know? A town called Gravesend fits our bill.
Biking past the Cutty Sark, which is apparently an actual ship that once existed, we snake along the River Thames, and that, of course, gradually turns into the Thames River. On this route, we pass many miles of affordable housing projects straddling the riverbank looking as if they were ripped directly from an Elvis Costello song (and indeed I cannot help but play ‘Shipbuilding’ in my head, as it is at least the third best song written in the last 50 years).
Our ride is mostly paved! Mostly gray! Mostly empty! And during the brief moment in which I take the lead, following the open-source app on my phone, I lead us directly into an industrial dump.
After a granola bar in Dartford, a typical British town that also happens to be the birthplace of the Glimmer Twins (Mick Townsend and Keith Whats-his-name, or so says the statue), it’s around an hours journey along the highway to Gravesend, another typical British town that also happens to be the deathplace of literally Pocahontas (and that is true).
A bright-eyed Serbian man named Petar welcomes us, Mark and Eric, to our first hotel as a biking duo, and the dour and cigarettey house nicknamed Shamrock Guest House receives those two bikes and their idiot owners in a courtyard that has one, Mark (and the other, me, by extension) feeling nervous.
Nothing that a pint or three can’t fix, and after a visit to the supermarket for granola bars and chia seeds, we pay our respects to the lost bones of that Indigenous American Princess, we dig into cockles and rashers on toast, a burger, and a beef roast, plus around a half-gallon of real ale at Three Daws, the oldest pub in the village.
Finally, my lifelong goal of eating Yorkshire pudding in a room full of leather-bound encyclopedias complete, and after a walk back to the Shamrock, a proper poo, and some mild panicking about what the hell I’ve gotten myself into, I drift into a mildly pained night’s rest.
And thaaaat’s the first entry! Ta. More England to come! And France! And ale! And wine! And, you guessed it, loooots more complaining!