Pause..

My mother ended up in the ICU with severe pneumonia so I'm back in Newfoundland for a while. Her good friends have been taking care of things until I could get here and I'm very, very thankful for all they've done. Mom's prognosis appears good at the moment and I should know more soon.
The journey will hopefully continue at a later date.

And They're Off!

I hit the end of the south coast of Britain at Land's End this past week and have begun heading north. Riding from Land's End to John O' Groats at the northern tip of Scotland is a popular bicycle touring route here, so there were a number of other cyclists there when I arrived. Everybody gets a quick photo taken before heading off to nearby campgrounds -- or into Penzance for the night -- and then resuming their journey northward the next day. It's a little like the start of the Dakar rally.

I don't see the other riders much on the road, however. Unlike the U.S. Pacific Coast trail where all cyclists took Highway 101 and we'd spot each other every day, there's so many different route choices here. I myself have chosen to wander inland to Bath to visit a friend from university and see Stonehenge, but other riders have their own agendas.

The guys in the picture were credit-card cyclists, which is the term for riders who stay in hotels rather than camp. They left before me, but I ended up passing two of them on the road 10 minutes later when they stopped to look for the third guy. He'd fallen behind and taken a different road, and they had to find him because he was the only one who knew where their hotel reservation was!

For the Swimmers..

You can't ride all the time. Sometimes even cycling is too fast and I don't get to fully enjoy the towns I pass through. Rest days get taken up with shopping, laundry and Internet, so every now and then I check into a hostel and chill for a few nights.

Since I like to swim, I hung out on a recent stop in Plymouth at the Tinside Lido. The lido is a giant circular pool that was built on the seafront in the 1930s and is fed with seawater. A maze of steps lead down the cliff to the pool as well as to other little tide-fed pools, sunbathing decks, diving boards, and rocky beaches.

The whole place was refurbished in 2001 but still has a delightfully run-down quality about it. The concrete steps are worn from wave damage and the way its built makes it so you can't quite see where each set of steps lead. I went down the stairs thinking I was the only one there, but found people reading books or even enjoying a coffee at cafes tucked in behind the rocks.

Plymouth suffered heavy bombing during the Second World War, and a plaque says that on one evening 3,000 people bought tickets to swim in the lido pool after hot day of cleaning up rubble.