Day 13: Caen - Andover
Its goodbye France and hello England today; we need to leave our hotel by 6.45 at the latest to cycle 10-miles to the ferry port at Ouistreham. There is a cycle path to the ferry port running alongside the Caen canal but finding the start of this in the centre of Caen proved especially difficult, we were not helped by the fact that there were two roads with the same name and we were following the wrong one. This was pressure time for Mark who was leading us out of the city, the clock was ticking and the ferry wouldn’t wait around for us. After a few minutes map reading and a little help from Matt and Paul, who had cycled the route yesterday with Mark and me to Pegasus Bridge, we had found the blue canal bridge we were looking for and were soon speeding along the cycle track towards our ferry home.
After six hours on the ferry the last thing any of us wanted to do was get back on our bikes but we had no option so at just before 2.00pm we are back on the bikes and cycling out of Portsmouth on our way to Andover (a late change to the plan as I had difficulty in finding a suitable hotel in Winchester). What a difference there is between cycling in France and England, in France the roads were in the main quiet and smooth, back in England there seemed to be cars and potholes everywhere. Not far from Portsmouth and going down a steep hill David’s bike begins to wobble uncontrollably and he only just managed to stay on it. Having checked the bike over and found it to is okay one can only assume it was the appalling state of the road that caused the problem. After 4-hours of tough cycling on very poor roads and with Friday rush hour traffic to contend with, twelve weary cyclists were very relieved to see a sign for our hotel, unfortunately the hotel was at the top of a hill, they hadn’t told me that when I booked it! It was now twelve hours since we had left the hotel in Caen and we had cycled 50-miles, the first 10 of these being a delight as we followed the Caen canal, in contrast the final 40 were in the main, hell!
View photos from our thirteenth day: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bikeride2010
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