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Day 3 Taunton – Bristol
Weather – Bad to Appalling
Dr Pepper – Average: Not available in some shops.
Terrain – Easy morning extremely hard afternoon.
Campsite – Excellent: Woodhouse park scout campsite, Fernhill, Almondsbury, South Gloucestershire. Highly recommended, possibly scouts only though.
Another eventful day but a bit depressing because although we gave ourselves a big head start by doing extra distance yesterday we got to our campsite as it was getting dark the latest to date. As soon as we set off, Lister’s gears crunched again so while we took the chain off to fix the problem Martin again went on ahead to Bridgwater, the nearest town, to look for a bike shop. We met there and went to the Halfords Martin found, then had to camp outside for quarter of an hour before they opened at eight. Here is a picture of us outside the Halfords. On the right Richard is eating cereal dry out of the packet.
When they did open we headed for the bike counter and told the employee what we wanted. He didn’t seem to have a clue – not the last time we were to encounter this problem at Halfords – but eventually decided he didn’t have one. Another half an hour down the drain, and we moved on towards Cheddar, crossing the M5 for the first time of many. The weather at this point was good and we found it easy going all the way to the base of the gorge.
We had noticed ever since we left the A30 there were a lot of lorries on the road, many of them mining trucks presumably on their way to quarries. At one particular junction just before Cheddar it was particularly noticeable that seemingly every vehicle coming from every direction was a lorry, and I nearly got a good photo of this but a huge lorry pulled out in front of me to spoil it!
At Cheddar we stopped for a bit, bought a new film for the camera and had lunch. Setting off up the gorge though was tough, and the Dr Pepper is pictured above with an 18% sign looking back where we had just climbed. Amazingly Lister’s gears had sort of fixed themselves and now had about 7 in total, a situation we never had time to look at again. By this time Martin had no low gears, I had no high gears and we kept saying we needed to sort them all out but never had time and that is how the bikes completed the trip, as bigger problems presented themselves we forgot about these smaller details and got on with it!
After Cheddar we thought there would be a downhill the other side of the Mendip hills. Time and time again we approached what appeared to be the summit only for it to open out and an even larger hill be ahead. I must stress I am not joking and I don’t think we went downhill in this entire section, however in the end it turned out we had made a mistake and unnecessarily cycled the entire length of the Mendips. This was our biggest error of the whole trip and we ended up cycling an extra 15 miles at least. At Cheddar we had checked the map and decided it was straight on until Bristol, but we must have missed the turn off because we ended up miles off course. To top it all the weather turned from sunshine to hailstones pelting our faces intermittently requiring a number of stops to take off and put on again our cags. The hail was so strong that we passed a car pulled over with a cracked windscreen (I assume the two were related) and at one point we had to stop halfway down a hill with our backs to the hail because it was impossible to continue.
As we approached Bristol it started raining again so a mack stop was necessary. As we pulled off the road Lister caught a slippery curb with his back tyre and fell off. Fortunately with no major injuries a couple of minutes later we were on our way again, much to Martin’s amusement as we had confidently predicted he would be the first to fall off based on his past record. In fact later in the ride Martin was to have our only spectacular incident when he crashed into a wall at the bottom of a hill.
After briefly getting lost again at Bristol including walking over the first lock on the river Avon then lifting our bikes over a barrier when we realised we probably weren’t supposed to be there, we got on the wide pavement of the A4 and headed north. With no time to visit the Clifton suspension bridge we cycled under it, then turned off and headed up the cliffs towards the town centre, from where I took this picture:
We were just about on target but then the rot set in and we got a series of punctures all on my back tyre while cycling near a large park in the north of Bristol. In total we stopped four times to attend to seven punctures, which came mostly in pairs of two holes next to each other. Each time we stopped took an age because of the tools we were working with: we had to get the wheel off using two useless flat multi-tools which provided no leverage and kill your hands, then repair the puncture and pump it up using the new but rubbish pump which provided much frustration as it only let air in at all when it felt like it and made hard work of everything. Each time including the last we thoroughly checked the tyre (the holes were on the side rather than the bottom) and found nothing. On top of all this we had exhausted our supply of spare tubes as we never had time to repair them in the evenings. Why so many punctures on the same tyre or two holes at once we still have no idea to this day, but the tyre stayed up finally for the duration until the wheel broke on the last day. Our only theory regarding this was that we had been under-inflating the tyre although even this seemed unlikely. The tyres said inflate to a maximum of 85psi but we had no idea what pressure we had so just pumped them up as much as we could each time. The pump was supposed to do up to 110psi but I am confident that we never exceeded the 85psi maximum based on just feeling the tyre!
Halfway through fixing one of the punctures at the edge of the road we were interrupted by a lycra-clad cyclist who I thought was going to offer to help but in fact wanted to know where we had bought the pannier bags from. I told him the web address (see the links section) but he seemed unimpressed and ungratefully cycled off without any form of a thank-you. Unfortunately that was the first time of several where we encountered miserable cyclists who seemed to think they were more important than us just because we were wearing normal clothes and not all geared up in pink.
At last we got out of Bristol and as we left we passed this South Gloucestershire sign. At the time it was light but it must have been getting late because the flash has gone off and made it look like it was pitch black. Finally at about 8.30 just as it really did get dark we found the campsite and struck lucky. In the warden’s hut, which incidentally was like a sauna, were the warden and two other friendly men, all in jumpers. We told them what we were up to and stood and baked while they asked us all kinds of rather unusual and unrelated questions. Coming to the conclusion that they were all mad they charged us a reasonable £8.70 and just as we were leaving asked if we wanted to use a barn “to keep our stuff dry”.
As he showed us where he meant it turned out to be a fully furnished hut that he said we could use rather than putting our tent up, sleeping on big padded chairs. He then began chatting randomly again after we said how great this was. On the off-chance Rich asked if there were showers, and he said he would open them up just for us. We were the only people on the site. We asked if there was a washing machine or tumble dryer and he said yes there was a dryer right in the corner, which he unlocked for us. He then explained that it costs £1 per time, no problem we said but he then told us “but you get your pound back afterwards because there’s no lock on the coin tray”. After thanking him again and again he left and we had the best night’s sleep of the trip and ate the pasta meal that we didn’t eat the night before. We were able to dry everything out and repack the bags sensibly for the first time. We never saw what the rest of the site was like as we got there so late but I certainly wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone, although as a scout site it may be members only. This is the hut taken as we were leaving in the morning.
