First Few Days (Testing, Testing)

Our first multi-day adventure with all of our kit; figuring out what works, what doesn’t and if we like this kind of thing.

So on Sunday we set out from Sheffield, on the train, across to Lincoln.  We decided to hop on the train because we would have been just covering the same ground as the micro trip in July.  It’s always quite nerve racking using trains around Sheffield because on so many of the lines they only really allow two bikes, which means that if anybody else had decided to take a trip on their bike at the time to Lincoln, or any stop on the way, then our holiday would be off to a bad start.  Fortunately, the line started at Sheffield and we were the only folks with bikes so we headed east.

Once we arrived, we disembarked, got fully laden and had a bit of a fight with the tiny lifts at the station which only just fit one bike and rider at a time, but with the loaded bikes probably weighing in at over 30kg carrying them up the stairs and back down was not really an option.  Making our way out the station we headed to our first campsite in Fishtoft, just outside of Boston.  We found ourselves on some very picturesque back roads with no traffic so we could cycle side-by-side and just talk away the miles.  The roads were good quality and almost spirit level flat and we made pretty easy work of the 30+ miles to the campsite; all in all a great start to the first day.  We even managed to get the paraffin stove to roar away, I feel it wasn’t amazing and it took a long time to actually heat water but Sophie is determined and adamant that in Central and Southern America that we will be able to find plenty of fuel for it and any gas powered alternatives won’t be viable.

The night brought heavy rain and restless sleep, while the morning was spent battling with a wet, soggy tent and preparing for the day.  The Monday was the first time we’ve woke up in the tent, cycled, then set up camp again.  It was a full 60 mile day and I wasn’t sure how shattered we’d be after a full day cycling on heavy, very heavy bikes.  The cycling started off fairly dull; just mile after mile of main road with Monday morning traffic and rain just beating down as we just ground it out towards Kings Lynn.  After refuelling and buying some food for the next couple of meals we planned the route to Deepdale Backpackers, and pretty much by chance found a CTC route (Route 1) than followed a similar route to what we were planning, but with the added advantage of passing through Sandringham.  We joined the route and from the get go I was complaining about why I hate this kind of marked out route.  It takes you all the way round the houses to get to the same places.  It covers more miles but hinders any proper speed by making you cross roads or navigate tight turns and gates.  But then, it pointed us back onto the road, turned us right up a country lane and we yet again were cycling next to each other without the issue of cars.  Cycling this way is such a nice way to travel.  You get to see more because there are the two of you looking around and spotting things (like the crazy amount of dead frogs on the roads in Sandringham grounds), you have company to chat too and the miles just disappear and everything just seems easier especially now that the sun was shining.

Wednesday morning we set off in dreary mist along what we thought was the coast road towards Cromer and round to Great Yarmouth.   I say ‘thought was the coast road’ because we only managed the odd fleeting glimpse of the sea and despite being a fairly small road it was busy with traffic and presented us with rather undulating terrain.  Whenever we have talked to people about our holiday they have always commented about the flatness of Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk.  Maybe it’s the routes we are choosing but the roads are not that flat.  Don’t get me wrong; Sheffield is a very hilly place and I love a good climb, and the hills over the last few days have not been a scratch on the Peak District.  But it interesting how people often comment on the gradient of an area, but only have experience of it by car, where unless a hill is something major it presents no obstacle or even real feature to a driver, but the even slightest incline on a loaded touring bike is noticeable to the rider, and those comments about how flat and easy it will be echo in my ear as I’m spinning away up the hills.  So after a hilly morning of seeing next to no coast line in the rain we have some warming noodles in a car park in Cromer.   The final leg before our rest day was a fast (flat) 30miles to Clippersby Hall in glorious sunshine.

All in all the first days have been a major success.  The heavy bikes have been difficult at times but we’ve managed to get them where we need them to be.  The camping has been a little uncomfortable but I’m sure our bodies will adapt to it.  We have about week of cycling still to do but so far all’s well.

Optimus No. 96 and the Hunt for Fuel

When looking at possible stoves options I remembered that somewhere amongst my Dad’s stuff that I had put into storage in Tom’s folks’ attic was a small brass stove, with a name ending in ‘…mus’ if I remembered correctly. 

So we dug it out of the attic and I unpacked the contents of the small cardboard box emblazoned with the name ‘Optimus’ joined by Colin (Tom’s Stepdad) who told me that they’d had a stove like that when he was young.  My Dad had kept all the bits together and I pored over the instructions, spare parts and soon had the bits of the stove assembled.  It’s a beautiful little thing and when I told my Godfather, John, about the stove he said he remembered using it with my folks in India many years before I was even born and I loved the idea of taking this little piece of Swedish kit that my Dad had used away with us.

The instructions say that it requires methylated spirit for the spirit cup and ‘best quality paraffin (kerosene)’ for the actual burner.  It seems a bit faffy to have to carry 2 types of fuel, but I figured these would both be easy to come by and relatively cheap.

We’ve got ourselves some meths from the hardware shop down the road, but getting hold of kerosene or paraffin has proved nigh on impossible.  We’ve tried Go Outdoors, Towsure, B&Q, Wickes, local hardware shops and The Bike Tree which Optimus have listed as a dealer on their website and nothing, no joy.  But on the recommendation of one of the guys at Towsure we tried the garden centre and managed to find lamp fuel with ‘hydrotreated light kerosene EC265-149-8’ on the label having googled this and coming up with an MSDS we were pretty sure we’d found kerosene and this would work in the stove.   Then lo and behold I was in the massive B&Q near my work with Faye, my colleague, and her eagle-eyes spotted a lovely big canister of paraffin.  Bingo!

Since we’re off on our 2 week practice cycling holiday on the 14^th September we wanted to have the stove working for this little trial so we had a go in the back garden with the paraffin and meths.  Not entirely sure how to evaluate this first attempt...  We got it to light, but you can see from the photos that this was rather uncontrolled and regulating the flame and keeping it alight were not really achieved.  I am sure this is user error and that with a little patience and practice we can get it working a treat.  Tom isn't so sure.  So we'll take it on our little trial run and report back in a few weeks.

Less than 6 months until we fly!

On February 27th at 12:40 we will take off from Manchester Airport to fly to Oaklands International Airport, San Francisco to start our 2 year trip around the Americas on our bikes. That is less than 6 months away; it is such a crazy thought.

Just for the record; I have never done anything like this before. I remember that after Sixth Form I wanted to go backpacking around Europe with some school mates as part of my gap year. Most of them went but I stayed home to work in a factory. While during the summer holidays at uni there were great ideas of travelling around the States or hoping on a train and heading off into Europe then Africa before coming back the next year. Again, friends went but I just found myself working in a shop up in Durham, a bus ride from my family home.

But in less than 6 months time we'll be flying out to California to start our trip. And do you know what, I'm nervous and I have pretty much no clue what to expect.  Loads of questions keep popping into my head:

• How do you find a safe, comfortable place to wild camp?
• What do we do if something goes wrong?
• Will we have enough money?
• How do I know if I actually like cycle touring?

At the moment I can't answer most of these questions and there is a voice in my head that says "You know what Tommy Boy, this was a nice idea but give it up and just stay in Sheffield, stay in your job and stay nice and safe with these questions unanswered".  However, I am really bored of that voice and I hate the fact that that voice calls me Tommy Boy. So that voice can do one, I want some answers and in six months time I'll start getting some!

Origins of an Idea

Where did it start?  Or when?  We've been trying to figure this out for the last few weeks, when and where did this idea of cycling around the States first take hold?  I've had a desire to traipse around North America for many years now, there's been a keen yearning to set out on those long open roads in my wanderlust filled heart for so long I don't know what lit that particular fire.  Easy Rider?  Wild Fang?  Little House on the Prairie?  Into the Wild?  The Littlest Hobo?  Honestly I have no idea, but that wilderness, that scenery, that vastness, that frontier spirit - it's been calling out to me for some time now.

So I'm not surprised at our destination, but cycling round it?  That's the bit I don't know how or when we decided.  It's not like I don't like cycling, I loved it as a kid, but when I bought my first adult bike 2 years ago it was pretty much the first time I'd been back on a bike since I was in my teens.  Tom's had a bike since we were in Dorset and has been riding pretty much 5 days a week since then and did a couple of 100 mile + rides which seemed pretty epic to me.  And now we have a plan that will involve cycling not just 100+ miles but somewhere in the region of 7,000 miles in North America alone, before heading South for a-whole-nother continent.  And it feels like the most natural, obvious thing for us to do.  Like something we were always going to do, but obviously we must have come up with the idea at some point, one of us must have pitched it to the other.  The origin is just lost amongst the jumble of other memories.

I feel a little envious of the people who are able to say "I remember exactly when the plan was hatched, my friend challenged me in the pub/I was inspired by reading this book/I just took off East on my bike..." whatever.  There's something nice about a definite beginning.  There are a number of things that helped shape this idea, we just don't have a timeline to take us from vague dreams and a bunch of possibles to where we are now, but maybe having a definite beginning to the idea of an adventure isn't nearly as important as having a definite beginning to the adventure itself.  And that we have a pretty good idea of.  183 days to be precise.  Not that we're counting...

First Outing

So a couple of months ago we had our first outing on our new Thorn Nomad bikes.  We set off from our home in Sheffield and headed east to a campsite just north of Lincoln, this covered the kind of distance we are hoping to cover on our two year trip that starts next February; a fairly balanced 60 miles with climbs, descents, city cycling and country lanes there and almost exactly the same on the way back but in reverse (next year we are planning on cycling 60 miles on day one, 60 on day two and then resting on day three, then repeat until we get back to the good old UK).

The first day started wet and steep but the rain stopped and the roads levelled out as we headed into Lincolnshire, but the last 10 miles tried our patience with a crippling headwind that sapped the energy levels and morale, but these were instantly raised when we arrived at out campsite, got all set up, showered and clean.

Getting on the bikes on day 2 was a little tender because our Brooks saddles are still very hard and fresh out the box, but the weather was good, and we felt fit so we decamped and headed off bright and early. With no head wind and feeling confident and positive we chose a slightly different route home to miss some of the outlying towns around Sheffield so we could ride side-by-side just chatting away; this is when the rain started, about 20 miles east of home, oh and the hills - the never ending climbs and descents.  We're not sure why the roads seemed to go straight up and then back back down all those hills but they were tough, I think I counted 5 long climbs that we pedalled up in horrific traffic and much worse rain; but pedal we did and we conquered and kept conquering each and everyone of them, getting into our low gears of our Rohloff hubs and just spinning away.

All told it was a great couple of days, but I couldn't imagine setting up the tent in the thunder and lightening that started not too soon after we got home, but these are bridges that we'll come across; and, much like the hills, all we'll have to do is just get our heads down and get stuck in.  Hills won't climb themselves and tents don't just magically pop up.

All Part of the Fun

So yeh, so far everything is pretty much going as expected. We have ordered the bikes, we're getting somewhere with most of our kit and we have started selling/getting rid of the random items that you seem to acquire, so all told pretty happy with the progress.  Granted we've had a number of unseen issues when we properly sat down and started planning our adventure, but that's part of the fun; right?

The first stumbling block was about some visa issue in the United States where you need to leave the continent to be eligible to get the two 90 day stays; oh well, we just changed the route and bowed to international border laws - no biggie. The second was finding out about the Darien Gap.  I cannot believe that I have only just learned about an "... anarchic cartel filled jungle that divides the continents..." of North and South America (great turn of phrase from The Runaway Guide).  We're not quite sure how we are going to tackle that one just yet, there seems to be three main options of yacht, fishing boat or fly - more research is needed.

But I think that the research is one of the aspects I'm really enjoying.  We started off with a vague idea but we built it up and developed it in our heads, and it all seemed so easy, so possible and it was just a matter of determination and time. Then the more we researched and planned, the more we realized that our initial idea was just a pipe dream, but that was fine because now our plans are becoming increasingly based in the real world and not a fantasy dreamland.  Our plan now has facts and figures with actual no-go-areas, laws and boundaries and, personally, it feels so much more real because of these limits and adjustments; now it has a grounding in the here and now, and that is really exciting situation to find ourselves in.

I cannot wait to go away, but before we do I know that there will be more obstacles to surpass, situations we'll have to figure out or major upheavals to sort but all of these will solidify the dream into reality.