Hello all. We finally made it to Britain! That means we have no more border crossings and it means we only have two more days until we make it to London. Having crossed the Channel now I feel like I can truly say "I have biked across Europe", which is pretty neat.
The riding today was "mixed", France was awful but the UK was amazing. Riding out of St. Omer, we ended up getting a later start than we expected and we left the house with overcast skies and a slight mist. It was suppose to only be 34 miles to Calais. It ended up being 34 as expected but the weather and navigation made those 34 miles tough, really tough. We had another headwind today... This time I think it was the strongest we have had yet. On top of the headwind, it rained a couple times just to add insult to injury. So the weather was already crummy. Then Google decided we should take the road less traveled (far less travelled). We were following our directions when we started biking down a dirt road through some fields. Well this road then turned into just a couple tractor tracks, which then turned into fields, which then turned into no sort of road at all. We literally spent a quarter mile bushwacking through really tall grass and wheat stalks to try and get through this "road" Google wanted us on. On top of the bushwacking we were also in really deep mud. Our poor bikes were finally starting to look clean again, and over the course of this 1 mile we just made them absolutely filthy and removed all the lube and oil we had applied to them. Looking back at it now it was quite good fun, but at the time with wet grass and mud... fun was not the word for it.
After making it through the fields, we made it to a gravel road along a canal and after cleaning the bikes with some sticks, we began to make our way to Calais. The wind along this stretch was really bad, easily sitting around 30 mph and gusting much higher. Alas though we battled on and made it to Calais. Then we simply went to the port rolled through immigration and then boarded the ferry. Aboard the ferry we went to the dining room, since we had not eaten since breakfast and it was about 4:00pm, and proceeded to gorge ourselves. The food was surprisingly good and surprisingly not terribly expensive. It was not cheap, but in comparison to the ferry in Switzerland it was the bargain of the century.
The trip on the boat was uneventful, aside from some big swells. In Dover we climbed up stairs to the top of the white cliffs with our bikes (this was really hard). At the top we were exhausted from climbing all the stairs with our bikes, but from there to Deal it was all nice smooth downhill biking and was great! We coved the 10 miles to Deal in no time, and made it to our B&B for the night. We are staying in a nice quaint little house and the host is really nice. She even let us use her hose to wash off all the French dirt and mud. All in all our day ended on a solid high note after beginning on a crummy one. Needless to say we are happy to be out of France and in the UK. Tomorrow we are biking to our midpoint between here and London, a village called Lynsted. I think that is all I have for now so best wishes and until next time.
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