The Long Way Found

A short account of a long journey

By: The Grumbler

with images and inspiration from Bob the B’stard
Let’s Do John O’Groats To Land’s End

It started with an off the cuff remark, really…

I’d wandered round to my friend and neighbour Bob the Bastard’s house to ogle his new motorbike – a BMW GS Adventure (the very same steed used by Ewan and Charlie in the “Long Way Round”). I should probably digress here to let the casual reader know why I’ve saddled the poor lad with such an apparently derogatory nickname. Well, it’s down to the green-eyed monster, envy. Put simply, Bob’s got more toys than I have and, speaking as a prodigious consumer, that’s no mean feat I can tell you. So, the Grumbler is Jealous, and Bob’s got the blame. As to whether he lives up to any other interpretation of his BTB handle I’ll leave to you, dear reader, to decide for yourself after ploughing through this mini-book.

So there we were, in Bob’s garage, tins of Cider in hand, drooling over this awesome piece of Teutonic transport technology. Bob graciously allowed that I might indeed, sit on the beast and, no sooner than I’d thrown a leg over it, he proceeded to demonstrate its electrically adjustable suspension. My eyes still water at the memory - flashing me a wolfish grin which should have had me running for my life, he flipped the switch that changed it from ‘sport’ to ‘comfort’ with the result that the bike instantly became 4 inches taller. Unfortunately, I didn’t. What I did do was let out a kind of strangled squeak at the sudden and entirely unexpected punch in the ‘family jewels’ that resulted before hopping off of it with considerably more alacrity than I hopped on.

Back in Bob’s study and provided with a cup of tea, for the shock, (I like mine without three sugars) he went on to tell me that he planned to ride down through France and Spain, Ferry across to North Africa, cross that, and come home via Italy, Germany etc. Did I want to go with him? No, I thought he was a loony. But like an idiot, I did say “But I’ll do John O’Groats to Land’s End with you!” and that’s how it started.

What follows is what we actually got up to, but I ought to warn you, I’m not above getting a bit creative in my recounting – after all, why let the truth get in the way of a good story?

The Test Trip And Other Preparations

Within a couple of weeks, the long suffering wives had agreed to our absence on a jolly; time off had been booked and this was definitely going to happen – or was it? Would we be drowned rats in tents? Would we get on each other’s nerves? I’ve limited experience of sleeping in a tent, and despite having known Bob for nearly a score of years, never had prolonged and undiluted exposure to the man himself without an escape route. Bob, on the other hand, had plenty of tent time under his belt, and apparently knows more annoying people than me (I don’t know whether to feel sorry for him or them…)

So, we decided that a practice run would be an excellent proving ground. If we could stand each other for two days and a night, what could possibly go wrong? With caution well and truly thrown to the wind, I went out and boosted the economy by buying half the stock of a camping store, or so it seemed at the time and the day, as these things have a habit of doing, dawned rather quickly.

We chose to go for a night away at “Symonds Yat”, a picturesque place in Gloucestershire, on the river Wye. The village huddles on both sides of the river which is crossed by an ancient hand pulled cable ferry (the nearest bridge is five miles away) run, rather quaintly, by the pub.

As it happens, we had a great ride to Symonds Yat, weather was nice, roads were OK, bikes were sweet, everything really. Arriving late afternoon gave us plenty of time to set the tents up and head straight over to the pub for ale and grub. The river itself was running high and fast, and as a result the ferry wasn’t running. Nevertheless, we had a convivial evening, and so to bed. Or at least, so to sleeping bag on inflatable mat.

I must have dropped off straight away into a blissful sleep – only to be woken after what seemed like minutes by a cow mooing mournfully just outside the tent. Hang on though, cows don’t moo quite that regularly, or persistently. It’s going on for ages. It’s, no, it can’t be, but it is! It’s Bob, snoring! I kid you not – farmyard impersonations it is! Well, after a short while, the pitch deepens and we get to a more ‘traditional’ snore – the long drawn out snort, followed by a wheezy, whistly exhalation. I swear I didn’t sleep a wink, and it was with huge relief that, at about 5:30, I heard Bob unzip his tent – awakened by his kidneys letting him know that if he didn’t take them off to the facilities they were going without him. I unzipped my tent, stuck my head out and glared at him. As one, the pair of us both said “You noisy Sod, I haven’t slept a bloody wink ‘cos of your snoring”. Apparently, we are both as bad as each other. Mrs. Grumbler informs me that she could have told me that without me having to ride to Gloucestershire (leading me to wonder how she knows Bob snores…)

8:30 found us sitting outside our tents with mugs of tea and bacon sandwiches, when the fellow on the next pitch (a decent guy from Cardiff) ambled past us. “Mornin lads” he lilted, in the sing-song accent of the valleys, “that was some world class snoring there las’ night!” and off he toddled… Earplugs would be firmly on my kit list from then onwards. I couldn’t take enough for everyone at every campsite we intended to visit, but I was damned if Bob was gonna ruin my beauty-sleep.

By the time we were ready to strike the tents and head for home, the weather was beginning to turn decidedly mucky. Hardly a surprise, this being England in July. I’ll gloss over the gruesome details, but let it suffice to say that it rained cats and dogs, and at least one pub landlord was pretty pissed off after I dripped on his wooden floor and had the nerve to ask for two coffees. As a ‘born again biker’ this was my first prolonged experience of inclement weather for some time, and by the time I got home I’d learned something that was to prove valuable – my waterproof trousers weren’t.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, by this stage of the game I had another list of things I needed to buy, though need is perhaps a relative word. “Had an excuse to buy” might be nearer the mark for most of them (sat-nav for example), but a pair of decent bike trousers, ones that wouldn’t soak anything under them before filling my boots with cold water, were a priority, for sure.

Clearly, a trip like this demands a fair bit of planning up front – and we started off by working out a route one evening on Bob’s PC – which he promptly added to after I was safely off home again.

What with work, family holidays and other interruptions, the remainder of the planning basically took the form of arguing whether we should (Bob) go to Great Yarmouth for our first stop, or not (me). I was pretty determined that we wouldn’t.

Friday, To The Mysterious East!

Start	2:30pm
Finish	7:30pm
Miles	181

D-Day finally dawned – Bob had to go to work in the morning, and I’d done no packing to speak of, so we planned to hook up at 12:30 and get going.

It goes without saying that it didn’t quite work like that – I packed and repacked half a dozen times, picking things to leave behind with an ever increasing sense of desperation – was it really necessary to have a change of socks every day? (Yes, actually, I’m not that much of a slob.) Once I’d got everything strapped on to the bike, I discovered that I could ride it, but only in a straight line. That might be OK for a Harley Davidson on the long arrow-straight highways of the USA but wasn’t cutting it for me and my Bonneville on the UK’s corkscrew coastal roads. A little bit of rearrangement was in order, but soon all was ready – 1pm.

Bob had promised he’d call me when he was ready, so I sat and had a smoke. Then a cup of tea. Then another smoke. A Coffee. Another tea. Finally, at about 2pm Bob escaped the clutches of his office, and we were ready for the off. At least we would be after a few pictures, Bob’s agonizing choice of which jacket to wear, and whether or not to take a tank-bag (no, he didn’t). Oh, and I had to get rid of all that tea and coffee too.

We filled up with petrol, and we hit the road at about 2:30, and had a pretty good run, for the first ten miles. Then we hit the dreaded M25, Britain’s biggest car-park. It was up to its usual tricks, but we were bikers, we could slip through the traffic faster than a prawn vindaloo gets through a Saturday-night reveller, couldn’t we? Except that Bob’s bike’s a bit, er, well , wide, really, with its chunky metal panniers, and mine looked like it had a jumble-sale tied to the seat. After a while we escaped to the A-roads, whizzing along quite nicely until it was time for me to fill up with petrol – something that was to become a twice or three times daily routine. I love my bike but, in their wisdom, Triumph have equipped it with a baby sparrow’s bladder for a gas-tank – a shade over a hundred miles, and that’s yer lot.

It was 7:30 by the time we got to Great Yarmouth – and losing the light meant that we didn’t really have enough time to find a campsite and set the tents up so we decided to find a typical English Seaside Hotel. Pretty soon we chanced on the “Marine Lodge” and Bob, who likes to haggle, went in to negotiate. Half an hour later we were discussing local chip-shops with the karate expert bartender / night porter. Even though it was only 8:45 when we got there, Harry Ramsden’s was already shut. Surprisingly, when we got to the next one we found a Lambo parked outside! There’s obviously money in Fish and Chips!

One of Great Yarmouth’s claims to fame is that it was apparently the first place in the UK to be bombed from the air, by a Zeppelin airship in 1915, during World War 1. Generally speaking, it’s recovered quite well, though there are a few bits that could do with a lick of paint or, failing that, a return visit from one of Count Ferdinand’s dirigibles might take care of it.

Saturday - Yorkshire, But No Puddings.

Start	9:00am
Finish	6:30pm
Miles	250

If you’ve ever stayed in an English seaside hotel (other than premier division) you’ll know that they can be pretty creative with space. On this occasion I was delighted to find the shower in what I had mistakenly thought of as a wardrobe – compact, bijou and surprisingly effective, as long as you don’t mind being jabbed in the ear by a rusty wire coat-hanger and smelling of mothballs for several hours. (I wont tell you where the WC was, but lets just say that’s the oddest place I’ve ever found a Gideon Bible.)

Soon we were off, though Norfolk and on our way up the East Coast. Now what I knew of Norfolk could be summed up in a few words, like “Turkey”, “flat” and “broads”. For the uninitiated, the Norfolk Broads are not, as might be hoped, a collection of ladies with loose morals and looser clothing – they are in fact a series of (largely man-made) lakes and waterways. What I didn’t expect was the remarkable beauty of the county in late summer, restored windmills (wind-pumps, actually) across golden crop fields, that kind of thing. I got one or two nice pictures, as did Bob - a surprise to me, since the lazy bugger couldn’t be bothered to take his crash-helmet off, and so couldn’t see what he was photographing. No Turkeys, though (apart from Bob and me).

Further up the coast we crossed our first big bridge of the journey – the Humber – where we learned the meaning of side-winds. I think the only reason I wasn’t terrified was that I was too busy laughing at Bob. He cut a strange figure in front of me, leaning into the wind at an improbable angle, and wobbling along like an old man riding his boneshaker home from the pub. I’ll have been no better, set off course every time a stray gust hit the pile of bags strapped to the Bonnie…

Soon enough we reached Scarborough, a little seaside resort in Yorkshire that was everything Great Yarmouth wasn’t – mainly that means it was open and lively (though I cant say for certain it’s never been bombed by a Zeppelin). Bob and I spent quite a while taking pictures, and ensuring that we broke all the “rules of composition” while we were at it – Donut and Mr Cone-head are good examples.

Oddly enough while we were enjoying Scarborough, back home, Mrs Grumbler was watching a TV program (Britain’s Dirtiest Beaches or some such) that labeled it as the resort in most likely to interrupt your dip in the sea with a stray turd encounter. Well, nowhere’s perfect.

Northward to a little place called Staintondale where we found our first little camping site. This was a very good start – a little field to the side of a house, horses in the field next door, a thriving spider colony in the bathrooms, and absolutely no cellphone signal whatsoever. Having got ourselves all set up we took a walk to the end of the road at nine-ish. It was as dark as the inside of your hat (unless you have a hat with windows, in which case it was considerably darker) – the only glimmers of light were from our head torches. We never actually made it to the pub, which was just out of sight round the corner and turned out to be owned by the same folks who owned the camping field. That wasn’t such a tragedy, though, since we had several tins of ‘all-day breakfast’ and Cider to sustain us, and we made a significant dent in both before turning in for the night. Ill-lit, huddled round a camp stove and flatulently scaring roosting birds from the trees. We must have looked and sounded like the illegitimate offspring of the Blair Witch project and Blazing Saddles – “Hey, where da white witches at?”.

To my surprise, all-day-breakfast in a tin is actually quite nice, despite the fact that it’s basically just baked beans with nameless lumps of highly processed meat mixed in, and when dumped into a pan looks for all the world as if you are not the first person to be eating it… If you’re tempted to try it yourself, I’d say “Go ahead! Fill yer boots!” and by all means wash it down with a warm tin of Scrumpy Jack – but if you do, just make sure you sleep outside, and make sure you don’t have any naked flames in the tent – if you know what I mean?

Sunday, North O’ The Border

Start	9:45am
Finish	7:00pm
Miles	272

Day three saw us all packed up and on our way up to Scotland on one of our longer legs, hugging the coastline pretty much all the way. The Northumbrian coastline is rugged, exposed, and very beautiful, dotted here and there by ruined castles. There’s a stereotype that suggests that the further North you go in the British Isles, the more warlike the tribes you’ll find. If that’s the case (and I’m not going to dispute it) why are so many Northern Castles ruined while the apparently ‘soft’ southerners still have glass in their windows?

Seahouses played host to our lunchtime stop, coffee and chips in the rain – it’s a place I had never heard of until earlier this year when I was talking to Acklington-based artist, Charlie Evans, about beautiful spots on the Northumberland coast. Charlie’s recommendation was spot on. So far, each seaside town we’d come to on our northward journey had been a little ‘simpler’ than the last, but at the same time much more honest and unspoiled. That’s a very nice trend, and I think I’ll have to come back here one day to spend a little more than an hour.

We also seemed to meet more ‘bikers’ as we ventured northward – the guy in the chip-shop envied our ride to Edinburgh; an old fella walking past us in the car-park eyed my Bonneville with misty eyes and recounted oily heroics of yesteryear wile his lady wife scowled and fidgeted with her shopping bag.

We crossed the border into Scotland, and I started scanning the horizon to see if I could spot any Haggis, that shy Scottish animal reputed to have longer legs on one side of its body than the other so that it can stand upright on the sides of steep mountains. Haggis’s don’t have gender, they are instead designated as Right or Sinister – depending on which side the longer pair of legs is to be found. No joy though - maybe they are nocturnal? We rolled into Edinburgh and switched to looking for fearsome dudes in Kilts – but even resting at the end of the promisingly named Queen Street failed to produce a single guy wearing a dress.

Finally, we pressed on to Perth, a town (formerly a city, but ‘declassified’ due to the odd rules in Britain as to which places may call themselves a city, and which may not - yes, we are that pedantic) that archaeological evidence shows has been occupied for about 8000 years.

Since it was ‘getting on a bit’ we decided to splash out on Bed and Breakfast again. Discovering that our chosen home for the night is run by an Italian, we invented a new game called ‘Hunt the Jock’. The objective is simple; it’s to find a genuine Scottish person working in a Pub, Restaurant, Lodging-place or Petrol station. Buoyed up and hopeful we toddled off to a “carvery” for dinner. Some of the other folk there were so old that they may have been amongst Perth’s founding fathers. After our repast, we asked the waiter where he’s from. Kent. So that’s Scotland nil, rest of world two…

Monday, Any Further, And You’ll Get Yer Feet Wet…

Start	9:15 am
Finish	7:00pm
Miles	280

The best breakfast so far! On this particular morning I finally got my teeth into a decent bit of Back Pudding. For the uninitiated, Black Pudding has blood as its main ingredient, and that tends to put a lot of people off, since they regard it as some kind of fast-food for vampires. That’s absolute balderdash, of course, though I have found that if I eat a lot of it I get quite uncomfortable going outside during the hours of daylight, preferring to hang upside down in the airing cupboard at home for the duration.

It was promising to be another big ride, so we wasted no time in hitting the road for Inverness. I know nothing about Inverness other than it’s the hometown of the “four and twenty virgins” in the rugby song. Since I do know many of the words to the song, we didn’t bother to stop there… Once past. Though, we found a nice looking pub in the village of Drumchardine. Two guys saluted with beer glasses as we pulled into the car-park, and we soon found ourselves chatting about bikes, routes and bagpipes with them over a pint and a sandwich. They are Scottish (as proof, they were consuming a traditional Scottish lunch – three pints of Eighty Shillin’ and a bag o’ crisps), but they don’t score on “Hunt the Jock” because they don’t actually work at the pub. The guy who does actually work there may well be Scottish, but talks so quietly it’s impossible to tell.

More miles, and we began to get a bit weary. Plus I was having to perform a seated version of the “Ali shuffle” to get some feeling back into my rear end. On the lookout for a likely place to stop for coffee, we played with our Bike to Bike communications rig. In practice, this was a method of pointlessly using up our bundled cellphone minutes by shouting “What?” at each other. At one point, after I had grown weary of endlessly shouting the same sentence over and over in the hope that Bob would get the message, I’m pretty sure Bob yelled “Did you just call me a dead custard?” Not quite, Bob, but close…

About an hour away from John O’Groats we spied somewhere to stop for coffee. An Ale-house of course – those who are acquainted with the Grumbler know that I am unable to pass a pub. It’s a nice place, the coffee’s great, and the barman comes from Farnborough (eight miles from where Bob and I live). Scotland nil, rest of world three.

At a quarter past five, we made it to John O’Groats – the most North Westerly point on mainland Britain. It was shut. Really! Sadly some of it, like the little Gothic hotel, looks permanently closed – though a search of the Internet suggests that the hotel is simply closed for major refurbishment and will reopen - sometime. Its rather deserted state presented us with a little problem – at each end of this island there’s a famous signpost that points to, amongst other places, the other end. Unfortunately it turns out that there’s been some persistent vandalism, and so the John O’Groats photographer who owns the sign there takes it home with him in the evenings – leaving a forlorn white-painted post as you can see in the entirely un-posed picture. The photographer is apparently part of the same company that works the signpost at Land’s End, and therefore Penzance based. This is a bugger of a commute (874 miles in a straight line); a fact to which this little travelogue will attest.

It was nearing the end of the day, and so far no idea where we’d stay for the night, so we pushed on and were rewarded with the perfect camp-site – it’s in a pub garden! There were sheep in the next field, and the sky over the North Sea sported some magnificent clouds. But hold on a mo, what’s this?

There’s a sign outside the pub; “Due to circumstances beyond our control, we are currently unable to sell alcohol”. I was crushed – no beer? That’s a terrible thought. Happily, the man behind the bar – a seven foot tall behemoth with the biggest hands and feet you’ve ever seen – explained the situation (politics!), ending with “So, we don’t sell beer, we sell this,” thump, a bottle of water hits the bar, “and we give away the beer!” He did this, incidentally, with a completely straight face, while standing next to a brass plaque on the bar.

Oh, did I mention, the guy was from Essex. Yep, Scotland nil, rest of world, four.

Tuesday, Suffering From Wind

Start	8:30 am
Finish	5:45 pm
Miles	193

We’d had warnings that the weather in Scotland was set to be a little wild during the previous days journey, and overnight it had been very, very windy. Bob had neglected to peg down the guy-ropes on his tent, and I had visions of waking up in the small hours to see him paragliding over the hills and out to sea, but somehow he and his tent stayed grounded. Shame really, because it would have made for some spectacular photographs.

Shortly after we woke it started to rain so we got the tents down and packed in double quick time and set off in search of breakfast, which we found at the village store/post office/petrol, station a few miles up the road. It was here that we discovered we still had the key to the campsite thunderbox and shower rooms back at the pub. The price of a pint elicited a promise from the postie that he’d drop it off on his rounds later that day.

The weather forecast is not often given a great deal of respect in the Highlands of Scotland since it regularly proves to be far less reliable than simply looking out of the window and having a bit of a guess but, on this occasion, the locals conceded that it was indeed likely to be ‘a bit windy’ on the west coast. So we chose to travel south on the B871, which turned out to be a delightful single track road with passing places, running alongside a river that joins Loch Naver to the sea. It was slow going, but sheltered and definitely a highlight of the trip. We stopped a couple of times for photos, posing for the obligatory silly snap before moving on.

Further south we skirted Inverness (again!) on some high and winding roads before dropping down to the edge of Loch Ness, to the visitor centre next to the Drumnadrochit Hotel. What a treat! It turns out that the infamous Loch Ness monster is in a pond right next to the centre.

Loch Ness itself, along with the Caledonian Canal cuts right through Scotland’s “Great Glen”, effectively rendering the top part of the country an island. It also makes a very, very good “wind funnel” as we soon discovered, making our way down its north shore to Fort William. Random but enthusiastic gusts would playfully shove us across the road, slippery already from the light but persistent rain.

We probably didn’t appreciate the scenery as much as we would in nicer conditions, and we were both pretty tired as Ben Nevis (the highest mountain in the UK) came into view, and we stopped off at Fort William for a break and a bite to eat. Cold, and wet, we were probably very lucky when we discovered that the nearest McDonalds was over 30 miles away. A brief but productive foray into the town had me returning a few minutes later with two big cups of coffee and two enormous cheeseburgers from a real one-of-a-kind takeaway that was otherwise doing a roaring trade in Haggis & chips… We ate these, protected by improvised hats to keep the rain off, while deciding (and neither of us took much persuasion) that stopping in a hotel would be a fine idea that evening.

This would prove to be our shortest full-day ride of the trip, but probably the most tiring. We were both hugely grateful to get booked into the Ballachulish hotel where we could shower and change and which, wonder of wonders, actually had a genuine Scotsman running the reception desk. Success, at last, on our Hunt the Jock mission!

When we met in the bar before dinner, I think we were both pretty shocked to have seen on the news that at lunchtime the road we’d originally planned to be on had suffered a 1000-ton rock and mudslide, and was closed with a 60 mile diversion in place. This had happened at exactly the same place as a similar event a couple of years ago in the evocatively but perhaps inadvisably named “Rest and Be Thankful”. Where Bob and I live, a diversion is usually a minor inconvenience. In the Highlands of Scotland it can turn a five minute trip into a two hour struggle. Fortunately, at least on this occasion, no-one was hurt, and the whole thing was cleared with the road at least partially reopened in a matter of days.

If It’s Wednesday It Must Be Wastwater

Start	9:30am
Finish	7:15pm
Miles	270

We both realized next morning that if we were to actually make it “all the way round” as planned, we were going to have to get some miles under our belts on day six. But we were on the very doorstep of Glencoe, which we had to go through anyway, and that’s just too spectacular a place to rush. No more than a mile or two from the hotel we pulled over at one of the many places along the road specifically placed for motorists to stop and gawp at the scenery, and, having stopped, we gawped.

This was definitely a highlight and Bob, who’d been there before, began to point out features with the irritatingly zealous enthusiasm of the amateur tourist guide. Just in front of where we were standing is quite a spectacular gorge. Bob, bursting with as much pride as if he owned the place pointed and declared, rather theatrically and with a dreadful Scottish accent, “That is the hidden valley where the MacDonalds of Glen Coe hid their rustled cattle.”

“Bollocks!” (It’s never too early for a daft argument with Bob.) “It’s hardly hidden, I can see it plainly from the A82, and anyway, we checked in Fort William and it said the nearest MacDonalds was in Glasgow or something…”

We rumbled on for a little while, took a few pictures and some very silly video clips, and then set off again, managing to travel nearly two miles before stopping and doing it all over again.

Much of the rest of the day was taken up with riding along fairly nondescript A roads and motorways, stopping off for petrol in Paisley, a town which was famous a couple of hundred years ago for having an advanced weaving technology which was responsible for producing the funny little pattern seen on 80% of the world’s brushed cotton pyjamas and a sizeable proportion of its braces and silk ties. Here, a random motorcyclist advised us of the ‘nicest’ road to take on our southward journey, and this led to one last encounter which typified the kind of welcome we got in Scotland.

We were gasping for a coffee and on reaching a town called Dalmellington we saw a sign for the Craigmark Inn. This proved to be well off the beaten track at the end of a long lane and had originally been built as the “company store” for the local mining operation. Back in those dark days, the miners were paid in tokens that they could only exchange at the company store where prices, as you can imagine, weren’t exactly competitive. Times have changed, and this is now a very friendly pub that was, at the time we arrived, closed. The reason we know it was friendly, though, was that the landlord wandered out from where he was doing a little DIY and quite happily sorted us out with a couple of cups of coffee and a chat. We even managed to get him on video pointing out that one of Bob’s mates still owes him for a bar bill! There’s a little campsite there too, and on a different day we might well have made it our base for the night, but we had to get on.

We headed into England, straight past Carlisle Castle and finally into the Western Lake District and a little campsite in Santon Bridge, close to Wastwater, England’s deepest lake. The site is in the grounds of the village’s Old Post Office - quite a peaceful place with very little to disturb other than the burble of the river Irt which runs along one side before disappearing under the bridge.

I had a few reasons for wanting to stop in that particular place – I know it quite well, and the roads for the start of the next day would be fantastic. But mainly it’s down to a pub, the imaginatively named “Bridge Inn”, which is home once a year to the “World’s Biggest Liar” competition - where people battle with each other to tell the biggest and most convincing falsehood. The contest is pretty much open to all, except that politicians and lawyers are banned because they are considered to be far too skilled in the art. Previous winning stories include German Submarines invading the UK to capture digital television decoders, and a yarn about the effect of flatulent sheep on the ozone layer which helped comedienne Sue Perkins become the first woman ever to win the contest in 2006 (though there’s some controversy here due to the belief in some scientific circles that the methane produced by farting livestock IS in fact a significant contributor to global warming).

Perhaps more importantly, the inn serves a dish of lamb braised in beer that I’d happily (frequently do) travel hundreds of miles for. I got my culinary reward, and Mrs Grumbler, who’s also a fan of the place, was suitably jealous.

Thursday - Into The Valleys

Start	10:30am
Finish	7:15pm
Miles	235

Despite the pressing need to get more miles under out belts we were quite late setting off. This was mostly due to our having procured one of the worlds best sausages for our breakfast – from Bewley’s of Bootle. Try and track one down, or as an alternative try Richard Woodall’s from the wondrously named village of Wabberthwaite. Only then will you understand that the cooking of one of these porky pinnacles of the butcher’s art cannot be rushed, since that would be a heinous crime. Despite having to work with little more than a tiny camp-stove and a lidded pot, we managed to do fair justice to Mr Bewley’s masterpiece

Owing to our late start (and Bob’s inside leg measurements, but that’s another story) we didn’t go over the Hardknott Pass, an incredibly steep and beautiful road originally laid down by the Romans and differing from most of their roads in that there’s not a straight length of more than six feet along the whole thing. Instead, we crossed the Ulpha Fells on our way south, and were still rewarded with smashing curving roads and absolutely breathtaking scenery.

Our next stop was another seaside town, that of Morecambe in Lancashire; between 1956 and 1989 the home to the Miss Great Britain contest. It wasn’t the prospect of setting eyes on any left-over beauty queens that drew us though, oh no. The town supplied the stage name adopted by one of this countries best-loved comedians, Eric Morecambe; and there is a statue of the great man on the sea front. It pretty much obligatory for visitors to have their pictures taken with the statue, and so, under the circumstances, Bob and I happily obliged. Video footage of Bob skipping along the sea front and singing “Bring me Sunshine” exists, but has been deemed too frightening to broadcast by the British Board of Film Classification.

Our next port of call was a little more contentious, being the seaside mega-resort of Blackpool. I think I must’ve made up my mind that I didn’t really want to go there, and for a while it was ‘off the menu’, but in the end, we made the diversion you can see on the map. There is a motorway all the way to Blackpool itself. As the motorway ends, you find yourself in the first of a series of enormous park’n’ride facilities, designed to keep traffic out of the town itself. These arrangements mean that the visitor to Blackpool may be hideously disappointed with the minimum of inconvenience to themselves or damage to the environment. I’m not quite sure how environmental damage would manifest itself in Blackpool - the outskirts of the town are already somewhat run down and I guess none of this contributed to my mood when we got there.

Despite Blackpool’s one-time reputation as Britain’s ‘Vegas of the North’ (and I kind of like Las Vegas) it really didn’t do much for me. Perhaps it was handicapped by the construction works all along the sea front, or the fact that since it was daylight the famous “illuminations” were off. To be fair, I’ll think about giving it another go one day, but not for a while…

Quite a few motorway miles later we crossed into Wales and some vastly improved scenery. We made our way to a place that Bob had discovered a few weeks before; a narrow shelf of a road clinging desperately to the side of a hill along a deep valley just on the edge of the Snowdonia National Park. The view from the far end is spectacular, stretching down towards the village of Llangynog about which I can tell you nothing other than it is an anagram of “Longly Nag”.

Nagging is, of course, a pointless pursuit – if it were not, then there would have been no previous paragraph relating to the Blackpool diversion. Stopped in a lay-by, we were not the only ones to be captivated by the vista, there being an artist fixing the scene in acrylic (paint, I mean, though the trousers may have been too, but they were more likely polyester).

Not far away from this particular vista is Bala lake, and its namesake town – a picturesque place beloved of outdoor-adventure types. By the time we had the tents up my throat was telling me it was nearly pub time.

Fans of ‘Little Britain’ will be aware of the character called Daffyd. I was slightly worried as to the reception we’d get, trolling into the town in biker gear with Bob commenting loudly and inaccurately “We are the only gays in the village”, but he didn’t seem unduly bothered. In the end, we had some decent pub grub, and I finally managed to get my hands on a pint of “Brains SA” (the SA is reputed to stand for “Skull Attack”) having been looking out for it for many years. I can’t vouch for its headache inducing qualities but lets just say I was fairly glad our tents were out of earshot of the other happy campers… (Strong beer amplifies my snoring. What else did you think I meant?)

Friday, Exmoor Excitement!

Start	9:30am
Finish	7:00pm
Miles	236

The end of our ride was beginning to loom by now, and I’m not certain that Bob or I had been totally sure that we’d actually make it all the way round prior to this point. Certainly, amongst the T-shirts we had in our packs, which Bob had specially printed for the adventure, there was one each with ‘complete!’ emblazoned across the chest, and another with ‘failed!’… Such confidence!

On this day we actually had a specific destination in mind to stop for the night because we were meeting a couple of guys that Bob knows from his Harley riding escapades; Pete and David or, as I have since learned he’s known, “Date Dave” because of his uncanny ability to include a date in almost any sentence he utters. If you name a band, David will tell you when their last album came out (useful in pub quizzes) or if you mentioned a particular kind of Cornish Pastie, he’d tell you when he last ate one (not so often asked in the general knowledge round). This temporal preoccupation is, I understand, a consequence of David having spent a lifetime dealing in classic automobiles – where it’s important to know dates of manufacture, registration and the like. But I digress, we were to meet Pete and David in North Devon, close to Lynton and, if we were to have any chance of doing that, we had to get going.

We left Wales by the quickest route possible – which is to say we headed further into it, almost to Cardigan Bay (a place very similar to Pullover Bay, but with buttons down the sea front) because the roads were nicer before doubling back to the border between Wales and Herefordshire and skipping back and forth between England and Wales on our way to the elder and arguably more gracefully attractive of the Severn river crossings.

At this point, things went just a bit ‘pear shaped’. We had little option open to us other than to stick on the M5 motorway for a few junctions, and the combination of road works, the resulting stationary traffic and bright, warm sunshine soon turned things a little unpleasant. Eventually, though, we were rewarded with our exit to the A39, which hugs the coast along the Bristol Channel offering some superb views of Wales over the water on a sunny day like this. It’s actually quite a challenging road, in paces. On the other side of a village called Porlock we encountered a stretch that has a 33% (that’s 1 in 3 in old money) uphill gradient with some quite fierce turns. As it was late afternoon and the sun-god was preparing to drive his chariot over the horizon we were almost blinded on a couple of these bends which certainly added to the challenge!

Before much longer had passed we’d entered Exmoor which is now a national park straddling the borders of Somerset and Devon, but was long ago a Royal Forest. Legend has it that a huge wild cat - the “Beast of Exmoor” - roams the moors, taking its toll on sheep and other livestock. I made a mental note to check the specifications of my tent to reassure myself that it was indeed rated “cougar-proof”.

Mid-way across the moor and after navigating a particularly steep downhill track we drew up outside the pub in a village called Brendan to be greeted by Pete and David emerging from the garden, pints in hand. Watching someone else drinking is about all the encouragement I need to get a camp sorted out, tent up, gear stowed and back to the pub in double quick time. This we managed, while also arranging for the site owner to dump a couple of loads of campfire wood by the tents. Very few places will let you have an open fire these days, but there are rare and often tiny fields which will let you, and I can assure you that it’s a real treat.

All settled in the pub, I’d scored a very decent pint of bitter and Bob was gurning lopsidedly at a pint of something orange, which smelled of wasps; Scrumpy (or rough) cider. Experts claim that there are three kinds of cider; fightin’ cider, singin’ cider an’ sleepin’ cider. Careful observation of Bob, halfway down a pint of apple based oblivion juice, suggests that we should add instant suntan cider and silly bugger cider to this list if we are to ensure that it’s exhaustive. Decent grub soon followed and we finished the evening with a flagon of ale (or in Bobs case a nice cup of tea) round the campfire for a couple of hours before Pete and David headed back to their B&B, and Bob and I scuttled into our tents. On looking at the pictures of the evening, maybe it was fightin’ cider after all…

As I snuggled into my sleeping bag I realized with sobering despair that in my earlier haste to get my hands on a beer I’d completely forgotten to check that I’d be safe from the Beast of Exmoor in my little bivvy. Fortunately though, Bob had by now decided that what he’d been drinking was sleeping cider after all and a noise like someone attacking a herd of bison with a chainsaw was assaulting me from the far side of the camp-fire. No self-respecting wild-cat was going to come within a mile of anything that could make a noise like that, I was sure, but just to be doubly safe I pulled my sleeping bag hood over my face, ‘cos if that works on the monsters who hide under the bed, its gotta be good on cats, hasn’t it?

Success On Saturday

Start	8:30am
Finish	6pm
Miles	231

Despite today’s apparently early start, the first leg of the journey was no more than 200yards, fetching up at the hotel Pete and David were staying at to join them for breakfast. Must have made for an odd sight, with Bob and me in bike gear, but we had a pleasant and welcome “full English” to set us up for the day.

For me, Cornwall has always meant “holidays”, since my Mum and dad would take me there twice a year as a kid, and it doesn’t matter what occasion takes me back; I always get that feeling of a heavy load lifting pretty much as soon as I cross its border with Devon. This particular day, with our goal in sight, great weather and late summer fields ready to harvest, the feeling was just fantastic!

We carried on along the A39 and stopped, in mid morning, in the little village of Boscastle (one of those regular places I would visit when still in short trousers). There was a spectacular flood in Boscastle a few years ago; the river Valency, rarely much more than a stream really, turned into a raging torrent strong enough to pick up cars and sweep them out to sea. The little ‘Pixie shop’ that had been a feature of so many of my childhood visits was demolished in the chaos, but its since been rebuilt with many of its original stones having been rescued from the waters of the harbour (a little higher, in case of any more floods). The two pictures of the shop were taken about 40 years apart… There’s also a very good museum of witches and witchcraft in Boscastle, but I’d no time for the dark arts today. I wandered back to where Bob, culture vulture that he is, was having a quiet sleep by the bikes and we were off again.

We finally reached Land’s End at about two in the afternoon. In truth, it’s a pretty commercialized place - gift shops, pasties and, for reasons I couldn’t imagine, a big Dr Who exhibition complete with Daleks and Cybermen. Still, it’s not what Lands End is that’s important, it’s where it is. Unlike our arrival at John O’Groats, when we got to this end of the Island the photographer was in! Somehow he figured that we were bikers (I told Bob to take the Helmet off), and so pretty much insisted that we bring the machines down to be in the photo, which really deserves to be a bit bigger than all the others that pepper this text:

From here, its pretty much all uphill… we retraced our route for a while (not much choice really when you’re at the edge of the world), before peeling off in a generally easterly direction to the edge of Dartmoor where we both came closer to dying than at any other point in the trip.

This nearly fatal experience actually had nothing to do with the bikes, or traffic, or anything else you might expect. We’d found a camp-site which was admittedly well-appointed, sorted out the pitch and everything, before finding out it was going to cost us twelve quid each to stop the night. Twelve Quid. EACH! In hindsight the uniformed and enthusiastically helpful staff, bewildering array of facilities, and herds of caravans should have given us a clue, but we were tired and so two or three times as much as anywhere else came as a bit of a shock and I think we both nearly choked to death!

Sunday, A Rest At Last?

Start	10 am
Finish	7:30pm
Miles	237

So we’d come to the last day with the prospect of a nice ride along the coastline and a final dash home to the respective bosoms of our families. The ride started off in fine style, across the wild and beautiful Dartmoor. This can be a pretty bleak and forbidding place when the weather’s poor, which is maybe why in the early 1800’s it was selected as the site for a prison to hold captives from the Napoleonic wars. Its now used as a category C prison, holding non-violent offenders who are generally unlikely to stage desperate escape attempts, but if they did get out it’s all too easy to understand how they might get lost and perish in inclement weather. But the sun was shining for us again and there was little chance of us dying of exposure. Thirst, maybe, but we fixed that in a nice little coffee shop in Moretonhampstead.

Lyme Regis, the home of “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” was our next stop. I asked about a bit when we got there, but nobody knew where she was.

Lyme’s a remarkably motorbike friendly place, so there were all manner of two wheeled steeds parked up along the “Cobb”, which dates back to the 13^th century and is a frankly magnificent cross between a harbour, naval architecture and a pier.

The Cobb also happens to be an unrivalled place to look out over the Jurassic coastline. Jurassic in this sense refers to the period in which it was laid down as opposed to the presence of a bunch of bioengineered dinosaurs; though I did see one lady who’s awesome teeth and evident love of pies put me much in mind of a megalosaurus. She was accompanied by one of the thinnest men I have ever seen. Funny how couples like that crop up so frequently, as if one of them always loses the race to the dinner table.

There was one last adventure that Bob wanted to tick-off on our trip, which was to take the bikes on a ferry, so we bade farewell to the dinosaurs, military companions and naval architecture of Lyme Regis and headed via Corfe Castle and Swanage to Studland Bay. Despite the fact that these places are, relatively speaking, on my doorstep I don’t think I’ve been to them before. But since Corfe not only has a castle (for which I’m a sucker) but also a steam railway (also known to draw me like moth to candle flame), I don’t think it’ll be too long before I’m tempted back there.

Now, Studland Bay… Bob assures me that his desire to zip through this area of outstanding natural beauty and special scientific interest has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that it’s famed for being one of the earliest places in the UK at which nudists, er, hung out, in a manner of speaking. Apparently the famed children’s writer Enid Blyton was a frequent visitor in her day and not only based the character PC Plod (from the Noddy Stories) on the local policeman there, but also set many of the Famous Five adventures in its vicinity. I have to say that despite having read most of the Famous Five adventures as a nipper, I certainly don’t recall any occasion in which Julian, George, Anne and Dick solved a mystery au naturel. Of course, my prudish pre-pubescent psyche would have done its best to edit that out of my memories, but I’m fairly sure I’d remember something.

Anyway, the road along which we travelled to Studland was more notable for the fact that about three hundred cars were waiting their turn, twelve at a time, to travel across the bay to Poole on the old chain ferry than for the presence of seekers of the all-over tan. So why did I feel somehow sneaky and somehow wrong while we rode along it? Simple, really… Cars have to line up for an hour or more, and pay three quid for the journey, while us bikers are encouraged to zip to the front of the queue where nobody can be bothered to take our eighty pence as they let us straight on to the ferry without a moments pause. Never mind the sun worshipping, the burning, resentful stares of a few hundred motorists pretty much gave me my own all-over tan, and you’ll be relived to know I never once shed the gore-tex and Kevlar. I don’t think Bob even took his hat off.

The absolutely final stretch beckoned, but the roads had one more spanner to throw in the works. After a very pleasant zip through the cool, wooded roads which cross the New Forest, we hit the M27 and stopped. Funny really, the only morotway that we used that didn’t have some kind of hold-up on it was that one to Blackpool! Still, the sat-navs came into their own again and guided us through a final set of pretty B-roads to get us within striking distance of home.

At seven thirty, near enough, we rolled into our road. Nine days and five hours; Two thousand three hundred and eighty six miles after setting off. High fives would have been in order, had we not been so tired we’d likely have fallen off the bikes in the attempt.

We didn’t do everything we’d planned to en-route, but we’d crossed off most of them. And if there are a few left, well, well get them crossed off next time.

Legal sort of stuff, and a suggestion…

The majority of the work in this document is the property of the Grumbler and Bob, who can be contacted via this email address: info@grumbling-dragon.com.

Much use was made of Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/) in researching background information and general colour. The authors have made every effort to ensure the veracity of any ‘facts’ quoted, but can accept no responsibility should any statement be found to be erroneous, out of date, or otherwise wanting.

Copyright (c) 2009 by The Grumbler and Bob the B’stard. This work is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0

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First distributed: October 10^th, 2009.