26.0 mi / 8.9 mph / 1377 ft. climbing
Home: Travelodge

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 is approximately in the middle of the south coast of England. London is east, and Scotland is north, so this seemed like an ideal time to explore the West Country, a corner of England we’d be unlikely to visit any other time (plus a ferry to France leaves from Plymouth, also to our west).

And the most-obvious thing to see in this part of England, really just a day’s ride from Southampton, is Stonehenge. Rett found special “Stone Circle Experience” tickets that provide tours outside of normal hours, granting a much more intimate connection to the stones, for a price. By the time I figured out if and how we could actually ride our bicycles to Stonehenge, the only tickets left were for the first (5:30am) timeslot. But that was actually perfect, because sunrise was at 5:46am, and the weather forecast was clear. If only post-sunrise tickets had been available, I wouldn’t have been interested.

But that meant that our alarm went off at 3am (9pm in New York, where we were just 12 days ago). Originally our idea had been to ride our unloaded bikes the 4 miles from our campsite to the Visitor Centre. Since our tour would be finished by 6:30am, that would leave more than enough time to return to camp and pack up (and maybe even take a nap!) But the unexpected challenges of yesterday’s ride meant that we no longer wanted to add those out-and-back miles to our total, so we made a last-minute decision to set our alarm an hour earlier, to give time to eat a cold breakfast, load up all of our gear, and head out in the 52°F darkness at 4:30am, right on schedule.

Staying off the main road, A303 (except for a quarter-mile stretch), added a mile to our route, but there were already trucks on it at that early hour, and even though they seemed to see us and our lights with no difficulty, it was definitely more-comfortable on the longer route. Zero cars on the B road, and then maybe 5 on the two miles of A360. Rett’s glute muscles flatly refused to join us in the waking world, so she had to walk up a couple of the steep hills, but we still reached the Visitors Center in plenty of time (the guy at the entrance didn’t even know that they had bike racks in the parking lot, so clearly few take on the challenges of cycling to Stonehenge).

Our even-smaller-than-expected group of about 20 eventually loaded onto a bus, along with two guides, and made the short drive to the stones. Along with a security guard, we were literally the only people on the site. Even better, we were led straight over the ropes that keep regular-hours visitors at a distance, and welcomed directly inside the circle of ancient stones.

Despite the well-known connections between Stonehenge and the rising and setting of the sun, it was funny to me how tickets for all the other off-hours timeslots sell out before the slot in which sun actually rises. Like, if you pick the 6:45am slot (with a 6:30am recommended arrival), you’re still getting up and on the road at a ridiculously early hour, but you’re missing the whole magic of the thing! Even if you don’t care about the woo-woo astronomical mysticism, the golden-hour lighting is easily worth an hour of sleep when you aren’t going to get more than 6 either way!

The hour we were granted to freely wander in and out of the stones was more than enough (a couple people sat and meditated in the center). The bus brought us back to the Visitor Center, and with the people for the next slot already arrived, there was essentially no one at the Center but an employee or two arriving to open up, and a couple of workers cleaning the bathroom. So we just set up our stove in the parking lot near our bikes and cooked up a second, proper breakfast (the Cafe wouldn’t open for breakfast for another two hours yet!)

Heading out again, a closed road meant that we had to backtrack on the A360 for a couple miles rather than the quieter alternate I had hoped for. But we would have had to rejoin it soon either way, and it’s another reason why I figured it was best to just pack up everything at 3am. After yesterday’s nightmare experience on a different section of the same-numbered road, I had been increasingly concerned about our route northward. The area north of Stonehenge is filled with firing ranges for the British Army, so there are essentially no minor alternate roads; everything is funneled onto the A360. Thus, the earlier we could run the gauntlet, the safer it would be, I reckoned. And surely the early timing helped, but it turned out to be much more what I had expected on a road with a 7000 vehicles-per-day traffic count (the same reported for yesterday’s way-off-average insanity); it actually felt calmer than the clogged up B-road that had routed us onto the even-more-packed A360.

Once we finished the gauntlet and could turn off onto an actually-quiet B-road, we were again shown how the web of tiny old roads makes the UK naturally good at sending bike tourers through small quaint villages that drivers would never see. Urchfront was one such place, where a narrow lane I’d planned to take was reported by a passing cyclist to not actually go through to anywhere (he’s also the one from whom we learned the pronunciation of tonight’s destination, Devizes…it’s bascially “devices”, but with a ‘z’). So we had to reverse out of the village, but seeing it was easily worth the extra quarter-mile.

We reached Devizes well before our hotel check-in time, so we found a park to hang out in for a while (I survived the obstacle courses). Then we walked over to the marina for lunch in a more-modern pub than yesterday’s, and finished with shopping at the Lidl grocery store. In our brief time in the UK, we were already checking off our three main accommodation types: AirBNB, camping, and now hotel. I never know how attitudes towards bikes will vary by country, but the receptionist at the Travelodge assumed straight away that we’d be bringing our bikes in with us, and even shifted our reservation to a first floor room. I took a nap, but we still went to bed early!