A British Comedy of Errors

We were looking forward to an easy day. That was our first mistake. We set out from Eastleigh, in the south of England, where we'd been visiting David's cousin and family (three young sons, all very different, but united in their fascination with insects).

The day's destination was Reading, a few hours away. Easy riding, not too many hills, and more friends to stay with that evening. We dawdled in the morning and met Adar at his office for lunch. We cycled for a while, then passed a sign in Winchester saying "Oldest Bar in England." Of course that demanded stopping for a pint.

The distance for the day was 40 miles, which David's ale-infused brain somehow translated to 40 kilometers. I'd been researching the bicycle routes on the Internet that morning, but the Sustrans site was overrun with traffic--the only map I could print was up to Winchester, which I vaguely remembered as being a halfway point.

After walking around the quaint, cobblestoned town of Winchester, we stopped at a bookstore and finally bought a map of the UK, only to discover that Winchester is not the halfway point. It's maybe the one-fifth point. Back on the bikes. A brief stint along a motorway, being passed by frenzied yuppie commuters speeding home from London, convinced us to take the quieter roads. Quieter, it turns out, also means virtually no road signs.

It was, of course, raining the whole time. Before leaving, our friends John and Amity gave us a compass; I'd joked that this would be useful for navigating when we reached the British Isles and could no longer use the sun for direction. No joke, it turns out. As we biked through the drizzle I thought the sky to the right looked a slightly brighter shade of grey, which would suggest we were heading south, not north. But it's hard to compare shades of grey.

Eventually, as we began to see signs for Winchester once again, we got worried. After consulting a local farmer and our newly purchased map, it transpired that we'd done a perfect circle. We were, in fact, just a few miles from Eastleigh.

So we cycled to the train station and got to Reading barely before dark (lucky for us, darkness doesn't fall until after 10 pm). Helen and Tim, friends from Victoria, had Pimm's and a soul-reviving meal waiting for us in their converted barn. We had a great visit and slept soundly--but we decided not to underestimate the challenges of cycling through charming, rainy, densely populated England.