We had another block of mid-ride off-bike tourism planned for today, so we were up at 6:45am, and I heated up bagel sandwiches on our stove on the patio of our backyard AirBNB while Rett nursed her still-throbbing ankle. The only “kitchen” facilities of our one-room outbuilding were a mini-fridge and an electric kettle, but… Read more…

The guy from the organic oils shop had convinced us that heading up and over the bald hills of Dartmoor National Park wouldn’t bring enough enjoyment to outweigh the suffering, so we’d instead try to see another side of England by heading straight south along the coast. The first actual rain of our two weeks… Read more…

The Kiwi we met in Bath had a lot of good things to say about the route west along the Bristol Channel, up and over Exmoor National Park. But he didn’t bring any “loaded touring cyclist” knowledge with his recommendations. Upon closer examination, there would just be too many steep hills along that route to… Read more…

We would depart the Mendip Hills down the same Cheddar Gorge that we hiked along yesterday, but on the bikes we would follow the road at the bottom rather than the rim at the top, for a completely different perspective. We actually saw some of the ground-level perspective yesterday, since our Uber drove up the… Read more…

Days 2-3 The heat wave was due to only last two days, so after sheltering in our cool stone cave to avoid the 92F high of the second day, we would have been able to ride out into a much cooler morning afterward. But, our cool stone cave was a rather luxurious cave, and we… Read more…

It’s been unusually (and for Rett, uncomfortably) warm ever since we arrived in the UK, but now another proper 2-day heat wave is coming that cranks the dial up from highs in the low-to-mid 80s to the low-to-mid 90s. We didn’t want to be riding through those conditions, but also escaping the heat is difficult… Read more…