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Day 6 Bromsgrove – Ashbourne via Birmingham
Weather – Good to Ideal, warmish with no wind.
Dr Pepper – Excellent, 39p cheapest.
Terrain – Best yet pretty flat.
Campsite – Jinglers Caravan Park, Belper road (A517), Bradley, Ashbourne, Derbyshire DE6 1EN 01335 370855. £12.
After the last couple of short days we were pleased to get in a full day’s cycling today. The land was flat and the weather was good: today was the only day we were able to wear just T-shirts. We packed up and left early the campsite and navigated the country lanes out of Blackwell and picked up a pretty large road into Birmingham (A38), which was easy cycling. At that time of the morning there was not much traffic around and we found that on the dual carriageway we could use the inside lane next to the parked cars and not get in the way of the traffic on the offside lane.
This road took us easily into the well signposted town centre and we sped through all the not so nice London-like suburbs and through the Birmingham sign, which was quite a milestone for us in the journey. For breakfast we pulled up outside the famous Bullring that is currently under refurbishment by the looks of it and got some great deals on hot cross buns in Greggs the bakers since it was Good Friday. We had thought navigating our way through the town centre would be difficult, like it had been at Bristol, but the M6 J6 ‘Spaghetti Junction’ which was our first destination was well signposted and we did not even need to refer to our printed street plan.
We did cross one canal and it made me think of the claims that, apparently, Birmingham has more canals than Venice. Either this is just fiction or the other canals were hiding but we only saw the one after crossing the entire city north/south. After narrowly avoided accidentally going down the A38(M), on which bicycles are not allowed but there was so little traffic we nearly didn’t recognise it as a motorway, we hit the A5127 which carried us under spaghetti junction and right up to Lichfield for another 12-15 miles or so. The junction itself was less than impressive from the ground and I assume it only looks good in the aerial photos because there wasn’t much to photograph.
Soon we were out of the city and into Staffordshire, which finally marked the end of the built up area that was Birmingham. This city, which none of us had ever been to before, had the characteristics of London but was a much nicer place all round than we had anticipated and we never had the traffic problem that you inevitably get in London. I have two further comments: one is that the local police were out in force and in Peugeot vehicles of all kinds. The other is that we did encounter a member of the local scum of the earth, an African man outside Greggs who bought a sandwich then threw both the plastic bag it came in and the packaging on the floor in front of him despite the fact that the bin was physically closer to his hand than the floor was. It is sad to see that we are supporting such people who have no respect for anything or anyone in this civilised country.
A final footnote to Birmingham is that in the week after we returned home Richard had to go to there for a work exhibition at the NEC, so after never having been there before he did it twice in two weeks, the easy way and the hard way.
Throughout the day the cycling was good and also the weather, for the first and last time jumpers were dispensed with and Martin was persuaded to take off his cag. We stopped for a civilised lunch of jacket potatoes at a nice café in a garden centre but otherwise rode non-stop all the way to Ashbourne, our final destination in plenty of time to go to the tourist information before they closed (again the first and last time) and found a campsite, which was unfortunately out of our way about 4 miles from the town. We spent a while in Sainsbury’s stocking up and headed out to the campsite. Oh and we crossed into Derbyshire.
The Jinglers Caravan Park was, I say regrettably, the worst campsite of the trip but that is not to say it was that bad, since there was some pretty good competition. We were met at the reception by a friendly lady who booked us in and was interested in our trip. The campsite cost £12, which is not a lot but was the most expensive we visited and the facilities were not of a great standard. The site was quite small and was packed with caravans and there was a tent field we were in which was also a bit full. For the whole site there was just a portaloo consisting a toilet, a basin and a shower. To be fair it was Easter Saturday and presumably it was crowded with people coming to the Peak District for a long weekend, but the facilities were poor compared with the others we visited. There was also a bunch of loud teenagers who were noisy well into the night but we didn’t have a problem with them until in the morning when they overtook us in their cars as we made progress on the bikes they shouted abuse at us and consequently descended to scum-of-the-earth level. Why people do this and what they get out of it is beyond me, but I wish they all had one big neck for me to wring. Still we had plenty of pasta to eat that night and after last night the ground seemed like a bed compared to the bumps of the previous night.
