Big Bird Bike Travels

Does a travel blog really need to be chronological?

I’m starting this near the end because travel is very much about the people you meet as the places you see, at least in my experience.

Travelling solo tends to attract others like moths to a light, however the more people you travel with the less likely others will connect with you. Maybe there’s a curiosity about why is he/she is travelling alone, or just an act of friendliness for fear that the person may be lonely? But whatever the reason I have been surprised by the number of interactions others have made with me. I went through a period during my first few bike tours after Rachel died that I refused to instigate a conversation with others, ‘only speak unless spoken to’ became my motto, I didn’t want to come across to others as that lonely old man desperate for company. I can do this on my own, I don’t need help.

Of course I have met so many lovely people on my travels and now I’m not so uptight about instigating conversations, no I still don’t want to be perceived as that boring, lonely old man, but not to interact is missing an important element from the great experience of travel.

This is a very long-winded way about why I’m starting this blog near the end of the trip.

My mate Paul and I are in a bar in Bruges, our last stopover on this short trip around northern Belgium in the Boxster. On the table next to us is a couple sampling a tray of 6 beers, a common pastime in this neck of the woods, for finding out which is your preferred tipple. I hold my hands up, I instigated this connection by commenting on their selection, and from those few words came a lovely interaction with a German couple who, it transpired, were great travellers and also fellow bikers. The “no we’re not having another drink” changed to “another beer please” and although it didn’t get messy, we probably all stayed longer than originally planned as we exchanged travel stories and photos of motorbikes. Would I regret not getting their contact details? Maybe, we got on so well, but I don’t want to be that perceived as………..Yeah you guessed it.

Sometimes I need something to inspire me to write, or more recently, cobble something together on YT. The interaction with our German biker friends was the catalyst for this.

Back to the chronology of the trip:

DFDS Newcastle/IJmuiden Ferry.- bring your own food!

At €32 – €44 for any meals on board I considered the child’s menu at €13 – it’s as much as I can eat in one sitting anyway but I had visions of the Ricky Gervais scenario.

There were nachos available in the nightclub, and desperate for some kind of sustenance we plumped for that, but never again!

Our Travel Companions

Convenience is the name of the game with this crossing, especially for us far northerners and Scottish.

Whilst on the subject of our northern neighbours, there appeared to be an unusually high percentage of passengers wearing their traditional attire, men in kilts seemed to outstrip the usually high number of hen and stag weekenders. It soon became apparent that the Tartan Army were on the march to the Holland v Scotland football match in Amsterdam. All good natured stuff even into the later hours after I’d retired to our cabin, when I believe it was shirts off on the dance floor, I scene I have no regrets from missing.

Talking of our cabin, I have lost count of the number of ferry crossings I’ve done over the last 14 years but I have to say our cabin is the smallest 4 berth I’ve ever been in, compact in the extreme. It was bigger than business class on an aeroplane, not that I’ve ever experienced such luxury, but not by much!

The road to Waterloo

Staying with the football theme, if there was a league table for best countries to drive in then surely Holland and Belgium would be facing relegation, no wonder these countries are so great for cycling.

By the time we’d cleared the very busy motorways displaying signs referencing Amster-something and Rotterdam we weren’t far from crossing the border into Belgium. Motorway travel is no way to see a country but sometimes it’s needs must. So for a change from motorway scenery we chose the N14 to Mechelen, this did nothing to warm me to driving over here. 

There wasn’t any realistic alternative to the Brussels ring road which lived up to expectations of being a congested stop start affair.

By the time we arrived at Waterloo I was left with the feeling that no wonder these two countries feature so highly in the list of the most populated countries of Europe!

Waterloo

Apparently it’s 226 steps to the Butte deLion, I counted 225 but I’m not going back to check!

Rachel and I had visited the Waterloo Museum many years ago but didn’t give it the time we wanted so it served as a good excuse when Paul mentioned to me “How about a couple of nights away somewhere”? I think his idea was possibly a short jaunt over the border to Scotland but hey 🤷🏻‍♂️

After most of the day at Waterloo we booked into a hotel about thirty miles away, it turned out to have a Lebanese restaurant, I’d never had Lebanese food before so left it to the waitress to choose for me 🤗

Ghent & Bruges

Rachel and I had been to both these places and I also took Ray and Ken on the bikes when we did the Western Front Way back in 2022, but Paul had never been. I enjoyed showing him around the places and didn’t need to have a raised umbrella for him to follow me.

Following photos are Bruges

As you probably have gathered I’m delving into YouTube so will not post them in any blogs. They take much more doing than the blog so inevitably will be published randomly. If you are interested in them then they can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/@BriKinsella/videos

Probably a three part series of our motorhome trip to Istanbul in 2018 and the eventual significance of a bracelet.

This will not be everybody’s cup of tea but needed to be done for my own satisfaction’ watch until you’re bored 😬

As is always the case there’s a tinge of sadness as I wave goodbye to my family at St Jouan after just a couple of days with Amy, Yann, Evan, Arthur and Yann’s family Luc, Servane and Yann’s brother Gwendal. Loneliness, just a hint, but positivity of seeing Sarah & Rob in the next day or so, and what more could one want than a relatively calm night crossing assured?

I was very comfortably accommodated in Chez Luc,, Yann’s folks’ new gite, should any reader be looking for a place on the outskirts of St Malo you know where to come! 😆

I may do a proper review of my trip once home as I’m just rattling this off on my phone in the boat’s bar.

Until then, or next time? Thanks for reading 🤗

Before sunrise I gazed out of my bedroom window and saw the wisps of orangey pink clouds with the pale blue sky above, the car was looking splendid, as always, in the car park below, and these two sights seem to mask the industrial estate on which the hotel is situated. I just see the things I like.

What followed was a roll in bed with some honey, well other than the bed that is, in the restaurant I had just a small roll with some butter and honey, washed down with half a glass of orange juice & a small coffee. 

As I lifted the lid of the hotplate my eyes, nose and mouth longed for the frittata but my redesigned inside is the boss these days and said “no, you’ve had enough or I’ll kick off”. This is what I would describe as ‘extreme grazing’, I think that I’ve always been a good grazer but this is a new level to the sport, and so I reluctantly resisted the tasty ‘afters’.

Before the sun had made a proper appearance I returned to yesterday’s road, the A66. I’d seen plenty of signs telling me that I was on Ruta de la Plata and mistakenly assumed that I was on the ‘Route of the Plains’, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Wiki:

Ruta de la Plata (Silver Route) is an ancient commercial and pilgrimage path that crosses the west of Spain from north to south, connecting Mérida to Astorga. An extended form begins further south in Seville and reaches north to the Bay of Biscay at Gijón. The path is used by the modern A-66 and AP-66 freeways, as well as by the older N-630 national road. Plata is commonly thought to derive from the modern Spanish word for silver, plata. The name actually derives from the Arabic word al-balat, which means cobbled paving and described the road as engineered by the Romans.

History lesson over, now back to almost the present, an apt word with Christmas looming.

It was cold, so much so that the heated seat and steering wheel were fired up, but with the cold weather came some lovely views. As I drove north and looked to my right I saw the sun not much above the horizon with the silhouette of a line of dark cypress trees set against the silvery cloud behind, a lovely sight which I could treasure. Inversions were commonplace but being on the motorway I couldn’t stop, and as is the case, photographs rarely do justice to being there.

I could really enjoy the scenery from the comfort of the car, not being distracted by freezing cold extremities, as would have been the case on the bike. Sounds like I’m getting soft in my old age? Well maybe I am!

With 170 miles to go and now being in the cloud at 2c it was yet another reminder, should I need one, that Herman the German was the right choice for mode of transportation. Ooh, now I’ve given him a name does that mean he is now part of the family like Reg the Rocket? If so, where does that leave the BMW K1600GT?

It was yet another lovely morning as I packed up the car on the sunshine coast, if the weather forecast is to be believed it’s not due to rain here for another 9 days and then it’s just for the one day. But it was only 2 hours before the windscreen wipers were getting a good thrashing about, temperatures dropped to 4c as I crossed the Sierra Morena north of Seville, but once I’d cleared the high plains things looked up, the sun re-emerged and it got to a relatively toasty 17c, although the wind chill factor determined that at motorway speeds the roof should stay up.

Today’s first leg of 346 miles would be the longest time I’d spent behind a steering wheel, or in fact holding handlebars, since pre cancer. It went surprisingly well, I was no more tired than any normal sexagenarian would be, probably helped by having a ‘Grand Touring’ machine, or at least I can kid myself into thinking that.

The Kevin Mystery

For those of you who are still wondering about the note on my windscreen, it turned out to basically be an advert from a fellow Porsche owner wishing to sell his car. A little bit like a wrapped Christmas present, often turns out to be more exciting than when it’s unwrapped 😆.

If you didn’t already know, I at least ‘like’ everybody’s comment and mostly reply, but you probably don’t get a notification so I’m telling you now, but please don’t feel any NEED to comment. 🙂

About an hour before sunrise my daily routine starts with the opening of the bedroom curtains, then I return to bed with a brew and gaze out to the lights on the horizon and wonder what experiences the dark continent holds. But it doesn’t give me an overwhelming desire to go, it just interests me, and may feature on my bucket list. I did a lot of research on Morocco for our planned trip in 2020 and still have all those ‘must see’ places on my Google map, who knows what the future holds.

As the sun rises and the twinkling lights disappear sometimes the land is visible and sometimes not, but across to the right where Gibraltar is almost always clearly in view, so is the Moroccan mountain of Jebel Musa, such names conjure up mysteries yet to be discovered (in my limited tourist world).

Last year, heck was it only last year, well about twenty months ago to be more accurate, that I returned from La Gomera to Tenerife, and stayed in a hotel for ten days. It was too long, I felt it then and with hindsight I still feel it. Yes I would go out every day on the motorcycle and try to find the few roads on the island that I hadn’t already discovered, but to have one base for such a long time wasn’t for me, it didn’t sit well with my limited attention span, I think I need to be ‘doing’.

Neither Rachel nor I were never the sitting on the beach type, nor sunbathing by the pool, that was how we felt independently, and I think it is still very much me now. Our form of relaxation was about seeing new places, others may have thought that we couldn’t sit still and that’s possibly still the case with me.

Tomorrow will be my eighth and final night here, it hasn’t been too long, but long enough.

Going for a drive in this car is giving me a bigger kick than I expected. I love having a spin up into the hills to visit the sugar cube villages, for which Andalusia is famed, and also to catch glimpses of the vultures which inhabit the high rocks in the area. At no time have I wished to be on the bike, it’ll be interesting to find out how I feel when I jump aboard one of them on a cold sunny day ‘up north’.

I came down to the ‘coast of the sun’ for a couple of reasons, to help repair this battered body with some sunshine, or at least to visually help, and to treat it as a winter training camp, like I would have done when doing triathlon twelve years ago! It’s serving the purpose for the first reason, I think I’m looking better if nothing else, a bit of colour always helps. The winter training camp idea hasn’t worked. Yes I’ve increased the distances of my walks and did do a little swimming back in Portugal, but I’m afraid that’s been it. I’ve done a reasonable amount of walking down here but no jogging or swimming, my mind says I can do it but my body is objecting, for a change I’m listening to my body! 

No I haven’t headed home early, but still managed a few glasses of wine and whiskey with them in the Andalusian sunshine.

They’ve tracked me down to Estepona and we had a great few hours chewing the fat about pretty much everything. They’re down here in their motorhome, just spitting distance from my apartment, so it was lovely to have yet another catch up with friends now that Gav has headed back north on his motorcycle.