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…

The main reason we selected a motorway Travelodge as our overnight accommodation was its proximity to Castle Combe. This is a medieval village (which doesn’t actually have a castle) that Rett found in her scan of the region of interesting places for us to visit. Our hotel location would make it easy to pass through… Read more…

Our alarm went off four hours later than yesterday morning’s, but that was still 7am, and felt pretty early. We weren’t actually in any rush to get anywhere, but with sunrise before 6am, it was time to really get our bodies onto a “bike touring” daylight-based schedule, and I didn’t want to “waste” the rude… Read more…

Our real target for autumn is not England, but France and parts south; we expect to do our main exploration of the UK next summer. So essentially we’re just spending a month or so in England “killing time”, waiting to start our 90-day Schengen visa clock. The Queen Mary 2 landed us in Southampton, which… Read more…