Wales (to Cardiffish)

Leaving Bath we headed Northwards towards Wales. I wasn’t quite sure what this piece of the trip was going to be like as it didn’t seem like we had a nice route (at least for the bit to where we crossed the Severn). Oddly, there doesn’t seem to be a single source of truth for bike routes in the UK… Anyway, it was a nice enough route until Bristol, but then we did run into a few larger roads which weren’t quite as much fun. Only a few km’s really, but enough to put a dent in your happiness levels.

Still, nice to see our crossing for the first time, and once we’d stopped for an ice-cream and a drink our morale was on the up again.

We stayed at a nice AirBnB in Caldicott. We were the first people to stay there, so you never quite know what you’re going to get. Still, it worked out fine. I felt for the guy though, commuting to Bath every day, probably a good 90 minutes each way. If at all possible, I want to stay within biking distance of wherever I work.

From Caldicott it was on to my Aunt and Uncles place, a little bit outside of Cardiff. Hot day on the bike. In fact, the weather in Wales was almost entirely dry! It was lovely to see Rosemary & Sam. We went for a nice walk through the “physic garden” of the local village. We saw a bunch of kids playing Pokeymon-Go. This game has quite literally taken the world by storm. In some ways I reckon it’s a good thing, as it gets people outside and interacting with each other. There are worse things. It was unfortunate that we just missed all my cousins who had been staying – Aidan over from OZ, Hugh from the US, and Anna up from London. Annoying, but just bad timing with getting from A to B on the bike.

Immediate thoughts on biking in Wales: the bike lanes weren’t quite as nice as in the UK, it’s a heck of a lot hillier, and the people seemed a bit friendlier / kinder to bikes on the road. Wales is definitely not a flat country, that’s for sure. Would I go bike here again? Hell yes – this trip we’re going to catch the boat at Fishguard, next time it’d be fun to get to Holyhead and get the boat from there. The reason we didn’t is that I was nervous of the brakes on the tandem. They’re basically just regular brakes (like you’d have on a road bike). Sometimes going down a (steep) hill it’s impossible to actually stop the bike. There’s quite a bit of weight between Maaike, me and the luggage. Mostly me and the luggage of course ;) If there was one change I’d make it’d be to change the brakes to be disk brakes. Still, it has been SUCH fun so far.. the tandem has definitely been a highlight.

Oh, and a word on bike gates. There are a lot of them. An awful lot of them. Some are far harder to get through than others. On one particular gate (the one I’m wheeling the bike through vertically), someone had written “This is a shit gate” and a follow-up commentator had said “yes, it really is” ;)