18.8 mi / 9.0 mph / 929 ft. climbing
Home: Travelodge

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 shove that yesterday’s 3am alarm had given us in that direction. Despite the hotel sitting right on a main road, and our room facing the parking lot, it felt unusually quiet and peaceful from afternoon into morning. Or maybe that’s just because I was really tired?

With our short ride to another hotel, we held our room until the 11am checkout time, walked out the Travelodge front door, and made a U-turn directly into the doors of the Subway that occupies a portion of the ground floor of the hotel building. Our first Subway in forever, the most interesting part was that only one of the soda options in the fountain machine had calories.

We dumped the remaining ice from our sodas into Rett’s water bottles, because by 11:30am, when we started riding, it was already 81°F, on the way up to around 85°F. The normal high here at this time of year is about 69°F, so this alarmingly hot British summer continues. It’s certainly part of what has made the cycling here more difficult than we were expecting.

At least our route today was able to stay almost entirely free of A-roads, for the first time; we intentionally chose a closer destination than we’d originally planned, to allow us to take a less-direct route to get there. Nonetheless, when we hit the A4 through the larger town of Caine, Rett decided to ignore my route that wound north and south of it on residential streets, and just take the main (aka “London”) road straight through. It was a sign that she’s beginning believe the reports from my rear-view mirror: British drivers are generally not driven into a blinding rage when stuck behind cyclists.

Yes, it goes very much against our experience with drivers in other parts of the world, but I’ve seen enough patience now to conclude that the rage we felt on our first day’s ride was an anomaly. I think a large part of it must be that drivers here frequently encounter impediments to their forward progress, completely unrelated to cyclists (driving on two-way roads that are literally one car-width wide, for example), so being slowed by cyclists is not really an abnormal thing. I wouldn’t have minded if the one guy had gotten off my ass a bit during the surprising 350-foot downhill we hit, but 50% of American drivers would have attempted a dangerous pass somewhere in the curvy 1.5 miles, and he never even hinted at it.

It seems that Travelodge leans hard into demand-based pricing. Rett had found a hotel was offering rooms for ~US$49 on this Sunday night, vs. the ~US$146 we paid at the same chain to get a Saturday night room. That’s only a bit more than we paid for camping on our first night! The only issue was that it’s literally at a motorway (i.e., Interstate Highway) rest stop, so I didn’t know if we would actually be able to cycle to it (there are actually two separate Travelodges there, one for eastbound drivers, and one for westbounders!)

I was able to find a route, and actually accessing the highway plazas from the backside was easy (at least the eastbound one; we would have had trouble exiting the westbound one to anywhere but the motorway, making it a true “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave” hotel). The harder part was a couple miles before, at a giant roundabout that we needed to cross three legs of (each time at a fenced pedestrian crosswalk distant from the roundabout), and then manage to get onto the fourth leg, a high-speed “dual carriageway” (in England, I guess roads with more than one lane in each direction are so rare (this is literally the first we’ve encountered), they had to invent that fancy name for them). Anyway, two lanes makes it easier for vehicles to pass us, and we were only on it for half a mile, so we survived.

In another revenue-maximizing scheme, Travelodge will let you pay for an early check-in, which, if their franchisees were fully on-board, implies that they would be very strict about the 3pm check-in for non-payers. But just like yesterday, once the clerk appeared at the front desk, she was completely happy to check us in, even though it was just 2:30. Screw corporate, apparently.

Another guy checking in asked where we’d traveled, and we were surprised to learn that his interest came from his experience: he’s also been riding his bike around the world for the last five years! (but he’s currently in van-mode, painting houses for some income.) We ended up having a great long conversation with John in the middle of the hotel hallway, that certainly covered bike touring, but also ranged into culture and politics, especially when the hotel manager, from Ghana, joined in, flabbergasted: “How could you guys not know?!? How could you not know what would happen?!” We knew, man, we knew. We just couldn’t stop it. I’m sorry!!