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Friday 14th May 2010 Wells to St Arvans Annoyingly I left my thermal base layer behind in the B&B despite doing my usual last minute check round. It had fallen behind the sofa where Liz later found it when she was cleaning the room. Being a very nice woman she went to the trouble of looking up my entry in the visitors’ book then rang my wife up to tell her about my abandoned garment and arranged to send it on to my home address. It turned up there a week or so later.
I departed from Wells at 9.14, pausing only for a quick photo by the cathedral. Just outside Wells, heading north on the old Bristol road, I came to an extremely large hill which seemed to go on and on for a couple of miles. I managed about ¾ of it but by that point I was near to throwing up so I resorted to getting off and pushing. Well, I’d only just had breakfast and on top of that my muscles were still cold, that’s my excuse.
As for the weather, rain was forecast but in the event there was only the odd light shower and otherwise the day was fine – still cold though. Coming in to Bristol the road climbs steeply round a bend on the approach to the Clifton Suspension bridge and I spied a sign for a National Cycle Route which I assumed must be the safe/easy way for me to get where I was going. It wasn’t, of course. Instead it deposited me right at the bottom of the gorge beneath the bridge and disappeared off along the river somewhere. I really wasn’t looking forward to backtracking and sweating my way up that hill again so when I saw the sign for a Nature Trail through the woods on the hillside I decided to try that.
Rough, rocky and muddy the trail rose steeply through the trees with steps up the steepest bits. A mountain bike might have handled it but the route wasn’t suitable for a fully-laden road bike like mine so I had to take to foot and do some hard pushing all the way to the top. Still I got there in the end, sweaty and panting, and after duly crossing the bridge (which opened in 1864, five years after the death of its designer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel) I was able to follow the GPS through the streets of Bristol with no trouble.
At the roundabout just before the Severn Bridge I wasn’t sure which exit to take, being slightly worried that I might end up on the motorway by mistake, but fortunately two other cyclists turned up at that moment and they showed me the way. One of them was a marathon runner who told me he had just got back on a bike for the first time in 40 years. They both told me that Monmouth was a nicer town than Chepstow which was where I had planned to stop, and as this was also the opinion of another biker who’d stopped me just past Bristol for a chat, I decided that even though I was a bit tired I’d press on. (this other biker had done Lejog himself with his brother some years earlier, going at 100 miles a day). Anyway I’d got just over a mile past Chepstow when I realised that going to Monmouth would leave me with a very short or very long next leg in my itinerary and that it would be better to stop right now. Fortunately I was actually passing a B&B at the time and on enquiring managed to get a room there (£40). This was in a small village called St Arvans which lies just north of Chepstow on the A466.
Another biker turned up to stay here – Roy from Birmingham. He told me he was going to leave at about 03.30 the following morning with the intention of riding all the way up to Anglesey and back, a round trip of 600 km in two days. It was an organized Audax ride. Roy was about 57 or so and had a well-used titanium bike; he said he didn’t drive a car. Incidentally as I stopped at St Arvans I saw yet another two bikers squatting beside a wall fiddling with a broken chain on one of their bikes. Both of them had mammoth bikes pulling gargantuan trailers full of camping gear. They were from Swindon, I think, and were heading for the Forest of Dean, hauling so much load it was small wonder the chain had snapped. It was beyond my ability to help them anyway so I left them to it and when I came out later looking for my evening meal they had gone. There was really only one eating venue in St Arvans, the village pub, the Piercefield. I ambled over there – it was only about 100 yards from the B&B – and got a rather small pasta meal and an apple, gooseberry and rhubarb pudding and ice cream. Distance: 46.42 miles Average speed: 10 mph Max speed: 34 mph observed | |||||
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