Riding up Hartside, eating sausages and not setting children on fire

I've been to church camp before, and I've ridden up Hartside before.  The last time I did both was 4 years ago in the summer of 2008.  The ascent of Hartside went pretty well that year, but a mixture of arthritis, thin sleeping mats and hurricane strength winds left me crying in the night on the camping weekend (although the day trip to Brimham Rocks was very nice I remember).

The 2012 edition of the camping weekend turned out to be much better.  I'm on stronger drugs now, and this time it was Woody the dog who was in a bad way with his joints, so lucky me, but not so lucky for him.

Mains Farm Kirkoswald - with bikes

Ruth and I arrived at the campsite (Mains Farm at Kirkoswald) at 5 pm on Friday, and pretty much as soon as we did, it started raining.  Thankfully the Holdsworths had a gazebo, and so we sat under that for the evening, and after I'd eaten some chilli and crisps that Ruth made earlier (not the crisps), I somehow managed to find myself seated next to Rebecca Walters as she was dishing out burgers and sausages to some small people with quite small appetites, and as some of the kids couldn't eat some of the sausages because they had chillis in, I got some of the leftovers, although I didn't want to appear totally greedy, so I shared the last few with Woody the dog.  He was so knackered from walking round all day, he was lying in the rain and refusing to move, and that's exactly the sort of situation that sausages can help you out of.  Having been in a state approximating his 4 years previously, I thought it only right to send some food his way.

By Saturday morning, it had thankfully stopped raining.  Ruth and I had planned to ride up Hartside and down into Alston, and despite some tempting invitations to go walking instead, that's what we decided to do.  We did however seem to have chosen to do it the same weekend as about a quarter of a million people had decided to ride their bikes coast to coast.  There were even groups of children in hi-vis waistcoasts doing it with the help of men with walkie talkies and luggage transfers and everything.

Hartside Cafe - Full of coast to coasters

Arriving at the Hartside cafe made me realise what nice bikes Ruth and I have got.  Some of the bikes parked up there when we arrived looked like they'd been fished out of a skip, or failing that, the local canal.  I haven't seen anything like it, since I saw John Munro riding a bike with perished tyres and an orange chain on our own Coast to Coast in 2010.

But things are not always as they appear, and the bike does not make the man (or the woman or the boy or the girl).  On the way up Hartside we were overtaken by a man going hell for leather on a bike that looked worse than the one I gave to the rag and bone man a couple of years ago.  Ruth shouted to him as he powered past us with his veins nearly bulging out of his head that he was in his big ring, but on closer inspection he only had a big ring.  The bike only seemed to have about 6 gears in total and he was in his lowest already, which may have explained why he was giving it everything he had, whereas we were just sauntering up in our granny gears.

So there was him, and then at the Hartside cafe at the top of the climb there was his polar opposite, a guy on some carbon thing in replica gear with about a million gears, who looked every inch the cyclist.  Until he started speaking that was.  First of all, he didn't so much as throw his bike down, but let it fall over against a brick wall, I shielded my eyes, just in case some shattered carbon came my way.  He was talking to his mate, and he was absolutely incredulous, at the fact that it was uphill all the way to the top of what is a massive hill.  What was he expecting? To freewheel to the top of the Pennines?  I didn't have the heart to mention that Ruth and I had found the whole thing rather easy.

It's oh so easy, if you have a bike with gears

The original plan had been to go into the cafe for something to eat, but the queue was massive, and so we decided to postpone our crumble eating till we got to Alston.  As we came out, team replica carbon guy was still there, and his carbon thing was on the floor again.  We left quietly before he started jumping up and down on it.

The climb for us had been lovely.  Ruth was on good form, and we rode up together chatting, and looking at the view, and it was lovely.  The only downside was that I kind of wished that one of the many Coast to Coasters who overtook us on the climb had asked me if I was doing the Coast to Coast as well, because I wanted to say 'Yeah, I'm doing it there and back over 2 days next week, I'm just doing this for fun'  That's the kind of demoralising statement more at home on the lips of my friend Graeme, that I don't get to make very often, and I didn't get to make it this time either.

After deciding that we didn't want either to queue up behind the million people buying chips and cake at the Hartside Cafe, or to get bits of shattered carbon in our eyes when that guy finally smashed his bike in, we rolled down the hill into Alston, and I got some crumble there.  Not apple, as advertised, but rhubarb, and strawberry.  Ruth had soup.

The cafe stop in Alston was nice, but pretty much as soon as we left, we were soaked from head to foot by a very heavy shower.  I'd been pretty critical prior to the trip of Ruth's purchase of some waterproof walking boots with SPDs that she had bought before we left, with the intention of being able to combine cycling and hill walking, but these soon came into their own as my shoes completely filled with water in about 5 minutes.  It's also a sign to me that the rain is fairly heavy, when my bike computer stops working because it's full of water, which also happened.

The view from our tent - I'm already up see

The man at the campsite had estimated a Kirkoswald-Hartside-Alston-Brampton-Kirkoswald circular route to be around 32 miles whereas it turned out to be nearer 50.  As he runs a business ferrying C2Cers areound as well as running a campsite, maybe he's used to lying to cyclists to make what they're about to do seem not so bad.

After taking nearly 2 hours to do the 15 miles to Alston I was a bit worried about the time, but from there it was actually quite easy.  The nearly 20 miles we had to do on the A689 between Alston and Brampton were not only pleasantly downhill for the most part, but also pretty much traffic free.  We had intended to get a hot drink in Brampton but by the time we got there the cafes were all closed so we sat on a newly installed bench next to a skip and ate two boiled eggs each and a banana.  A passing resident of Brampton was good enough to advise us that the bench was brand new 'But it won't last 5 minutes round here, it'll soon be vandalised, you can't have anything these days' or words to that effect.  Nice and optimistic I thought, she made me look positively chirpy, and my feet were soaked.

After the boiled egg stop we followed a nice B road through Castle Carrock and Croglin back to the campsite at Kirkoswald, and arrived there about 7 pm.

Can we stop riding yet, and eat some sausages?

Because I'd spent the morning bringing Ruth cups of tea and porridge in the tent, and as my feet were still soaked, she agreed to cook the sausages we'd brought with us from home, and I was glad we'd hired a brazier for the evening, as I needed to pretty much insert my feet directly into it for the next 4 hours to avoid them freezing off.

Do you remember those old cartoon postcards  you could buy that had a little cartoon boy and girl on them and they said 'Love is....'?.  Well as I sat freezing in my camping chair waiting for my sausages, I looked across at Ruth with her rain soaked hair, and it occurred to me that although this is too big to fit on a postcard

'Love is....Watching your wife (who is looking a bit bedraggled) cook sausages on a Trangia, when there are children running everywhere trying to toast marshmallows on a brazier, and there's an arthritiic dog running round with a massive lead trailing behind him trying to entangle himself in not only the burning brazier, but the Trangia.  And the Trangia keeps setting on fire because the fat coming off the sausages is too hot, and as your wife is gamely battling on, doing her best not to set fire to children and a hungry dog, the really amazing star finder thing she's got on her phone, which I've just found, isn't half as interesting as watching toddlers with burning marshmallows on the end of sticks and a dog swerving and running haphazardly in all directions near a flaming Trangia and brazier.  And it's even more surprising they're not on fire, because there's fat shooting out in all directions out of the sausages and the burning Trangia, and there's probably some on their clothes, and I'm sitting there with an empty bowl and having had some crisps as a starter, and she's enduring all this to make sausages for me, and I think that's what love is......'  Like I said, too long for a postcard.

Some Royals who were also camping there

Just before the evening ended, and it was all dusky, and you couldn't see much anymore, Woody the dog with his arthritis and emboldened by leftovers, decided it was an opportune time to go and imitate the action of a wolf and stand on his back legs and go and bark loudly at the man who'd been dressed all weekend as a giant lizard..  It brought memories flooding back of the embarrassment that can come from owning a big stupid dog, as Rebecca had to go and retrieve her own big stupid dog, from trying to attack a grown man in lizard pyjamas.

Woody the dog - who hates lizards

'He doesn't like your costume', she explained before she realised what she was saying, and to be honest none of us did, we all thought it was weird, but the dog was only one of us stupid and honest enough to tackle the man head on.  We'd just been walking in wide arcs around his tent for two days, but Woody took a more Trinny and Susannah approach to the matter in hand.  The next morning Lizardman packed up his tent good and early and was seen to come back from the toilets in normal clothes with his costume in a bag, and I think that makes it 1-0 to Woody.

So, after a few hours of eating sausages and nearly setting my legs on fire in the brazier, and watching Woody chase a big lizard I went to bed, and for a brief few seconds I was the last one up, which I never am, and then the next morning I was the first one up, which I never am, and it was my turn with the Trangia again, and I made tea and porridge on it, and I think that's what love is too.

Team Photo - sausages have all been eaten

And as we were all gathering together for the traditional team photo at the end, I thought back on how great the whole weekend had been, and I remembered why I love going on these communal trips.  It's because of all the brilliant families who go on them too, who are not only great company, but who speak nicely to each other and to their children, and who more often than not, give me free sausages....

Wearing matching tops, falling down stairs and picking up Bishops

Last summer I did a Coast to Coast bike ride with some other people, and it went quite well.

We didn't follow one of the routes devised by those nice people at Sustrans.  Instead we made up our own, and it started at Walney Island and finished in Saltburn.  The whole thing was the Chief's idea, but me having ridden a bike quite a lot I soon got involved in the planning and before I knew it I had agreed to be the map man, riding in front and looking for the way.  Before we went, I did a risk assessment, and I decided that there was some, but even sitting at home in a bungalow wrapped in bubble wrap and wearing no socks carries some risk, so I decided to go for it anyway.

It didn't run entirely smoothly, but thankfully none of the mishaps ended up being terminal.  I organised a bike bus to get us over to Barrow on the Thursday night, and they sent a bus which couldn't get up hills, so it took almost as long to get to Barrow as if we rode there.

As we sat around in the pub in Barrow having curry and beer the night before the ride, I looked around at the 14 of us, many of whom don't ride bikes, and I felt very, very afraid.  I looked at Ruth and Suzanne and Graeme, and they looked at me, and then we looked at the others and I thought, this is going to be a disaster.

But it wasn't.  I did a few practice laps of Walney / Barrow before we set off because I didn't want to start the ride by taking a wrong turn into Tesco car park.  This paid off as I took us the right way, and before long we were on the coast road out of Barrow with a massive tailwind going along at 16 mph.  And I looked behind me and we were all in matching tops and it was like being in a team again, like I used to be at school, and it was great, and also worringly easy.  I'd spent months telling everyone how hard and slow cycle touring can be, but this wasn't either of those things..

The beauty of designing your own route is that you can go in a straight line if you want to, and the lack of zig zagging and the use of A and B roads instead of tiny little minor roads with massive hedges on both sides meant that we made it to our lunch stop at Cark in good time.  The sun was out and we had beer and sausage sandwiches, and it all seemed a bit too easy.  Then after lunch we went through a lovely flat bit and we could see hills but we didn't have to go up any, and the only bad bit of the whole day was getting into Kendal, as it has a one way system that doesn't work, as well as lots of roadworks.  Oh, except for Adam falling in a ditch and Clay crashing into a wall, but they were only small blunders and not full-on You've Been Framers. 

So Friday night we sat around outside the Youth Hostel having a few drinks and congratulating ourselves and then we went out for yet more curry.  After the curry I went in to watch Brazil get knocked out of the World Cup by Holland and all was right with the world, until I got a phone call to say that Graeme had been hospitalised.

He had been trying to slide down a banister which sounds fairly innocuous until you saw the banister and the concrete staircase next to it.  I've seen bobsleigh runs which look less scary.  Anyway, he did a few commando rolls down the concrete stairs and managed not to kill himself but only just.  He had an ankle like the end of Misery and a wrist to match.

So off he went to Lancaster to the hospital and the next morning over breakfast I was just saying how lucky he was not falling on his head, and just as I was saying it, Jen fell on her head.  The sound of a small thin person falling over was surprisingly loud.  I suppose when we pass out and we no longer have any muscular control, all we are is just a big bag of water, so it was quite reasonable to make a big bang.  Off she went to the hospital and hopped into the bed that Graeme had just hopped out of.

Some people seemed to be wavering at this point about going on, as things were turning into a slasher movie.  I just wanted to get out of Kendal before any more of us got picked off by someone in a Scream mask.  This was harder than it sounds because the one way system is more of a closed loop that goes round in round in circles with no exits, but eventually we did manage to get out of there.    

I even found a short cut which trimmed 3 miles off the route, but unfortunately the short cut took us up a massive hill.  There were more hills after that, and it was all taking longer than the day before so lunch had to be sandwiches and pop sitting on the floor in the car park in Sedbergh as there wasn't time for lazing around at the pub.  After that, the route became more undulating and there was a lovely stretch through Dentdale to Dent followed by a long and steep climb through and past the Dent Head Viaduct where Frances was waiting to cheer us on at the top. This was followed by a fantastic 7 mile descent into Hawes. I started off at the front on this but was overtaken by almost everyone on the way down.  Most people achieved personal best fastest times ever. I didn't, mostly because I kept the brakes on out of sheer terror.

I was flagging by Askrigg but Ruth bought me some Sprite and a pie with lots of pastry but no filling from the very friendly local shop for local people and we pressed on to Leyburn.  Once in Leyburn we checked in to our dreamy B&B (Eastfield Lodge) which had a magic shower and in only 4 minutes I felt full of life again. Kendal Youth Hostel it was not.

As a group we met up at the Golden Lion in the evening (staff and food were both great,  I had Pork Medallions) and we discussed subjects many and varied including Derek Nimmo as Mr Spock and the statue like goalkeeping of Peter Shilton. As a special magical bonus Argentina got knocked out of the World Cup, and we got to see Maradona looking fat and bemused on the sidelines, instead of out-jumping Shilton for once.

Day 3 got off to a bad start, as I couldn't find Ruth in our B&B and this held up the start.  The wind was horrendous, but thankfully behind us, and off we went again.  After Bedale I started to relax because from there I knew the way and I didn't need the map anymore.

We passed quite close to home, but didn't go there and in Stokesley we picked up a Bishop and he beat us all up some hills in casual clothing and when we got to the top of the Moors we could see the sea, and it was a beautiful sight because the sun had come out, and once I could see the sea, I knew we'd make it, and we did and I felt quite emotional at the end, because I'd found the way from Sea to Sea, and all the hospitalisations that had happened weren't because of me.

It was lovely group to ride with because nobody moaned about anything, and this was helped no end by taking a big happy Welshman along with us, who just kept marvelling at the scenery.

And apart from the hospitalisations, we were lucky.  Because we never had to ride into the wind or in the rain at all.  We had to ride up hills and some of them were big, and it was still an achievement to do it.  But it did help our morale that conditions were favourable, because I have been on cycle tours that descend into farcical river bed bike-dragging in torrential rain and this was not it.

As some famous golfer once said though, the more I practice, the luckier I get, and we deserved our bit of luck, because it was the most overprepared and well-supported Coast to Coast ride in history.  We had not only driven the route in advance, but we had spares for the spares and backup for the backup and even a spare bike, which was just as well, since John Munro turned up on a rustbucket with an orange chain and some sort of soft cheese for tyres.

We had Bob following us round in a giant van full of water and innertubes and we couldn't really go wrong, and we didn't.  And I got to be in another team photo wearing matching tops.  Which hadn't happened to me since I was at school.

Here it is:

We also managed to raise about £3600 for the Great North Air Ambulance as a result of the ride which was a great effort by everyone.

We did have to call a couple of land ambulances out during the ride, so our account wasn't entirely in credit with the ambulance people, but you can't have everything. 

On the left are the ones that finished in Saltburn.  John Munro had to go home early and a couple of the others were in the hospital.

Germany 1987 - The least stuff I ever had

After I left school I intended to go to University, but I ended up taking a year off instead.

When I did eventually go to Uni, I ended up leaving after a term.  Mostly I regret this, but the amount I regret it is directly proportional to how unhappy I am at the time.  And the unhappiest I am is when I've got a job I hate.  So I'm okay for at least the next 3 weeks.

During my year off, apart from being the co-creator of the board game Year-off, I did do some other stuff aswell, including going to work in a chemical plant in Duisburg, West Germany (as it was then).

It was hard manual labour, but I got to eat sausages at break time, and I was looked after on the whole by my work colleagues, who were a mixture of Germans, Turks, Poles and other Eastern Europeans.

I lived with a German family, including Horst the father who was quite an angry man, and he was also pretty racist.  He was from Berlin and he grew up during and after the Second World War.  I got on really well with him at first, but then I invited my mum and brother over to visit and I was showing off a bit at the dinner table and talking to them in English about chocolate spread and I offended him with something I said, and things were never the same after that.  We sort of patched it up before I left but things were never really right again between us.

I went over there on the Transline 24 hour bus from Leeds.  It didn't go to Duisburg, but it did stop at the ice rink at Krefeld, which was a few miles away.  Give him a ring, he said, when I got to Krefeld, and he'd pick me up, or rather his daughter Ellie would.  

The bus got to Krefeld at 5 am, and it wasn't until it was disappearing round the corner that I realised I didn't have any change for the payphone.  I only had notes and the smallest I had was a 10 Deutschmark note which was worth about £5 then.

It's not the best introduction to living in a foreign country to be hanging around outside an ice rink at 5 in the morning, accosting strangers in broken German trying to find somebody with change for a fiver.  

Eventually around 6 someone took pity on me and gave me some change for the phone, and I thanked her and then managed to arrange my lift.

Horst and his family lived in an apartment near the chemical plant in Duisburg (he had 5 children, but only the youngest Nicole was still at home) and I rented a room off them on the floor above.  I could see the Rhine out of the window.  I had my own sink and toilet but a lot of the time they invited me downstairs for meals and let me use their bathroom.

For 3 months I lived there and all I had was what I had been able to take in a suitcase.  Some clothes, a copy of Wandering by Hermann Hesse, a Walkman and a few cassettes.  Back home, my brother had taken the bedroom that I'd vacated and what possessions I'd left behind would probably have fitted into a shoebox.  

Horst lent me a bike, which I used sometimes, but mostly I just walked everywhere.  I got nearly all my meals at the works canteen or at Macdonalds, I did a heavy manual job, lifting sacks of powder onto palettes and most days I went into the centre of Duisburg, which was about a 3 mile walk each way. 

On my days off, I got the train to other cities, like Hannover, Dusseldorf and Essen and I just walked around there for hours on end.  I didn't buy maps, I just walked around and found things out by looking.  In the 3 months I was away I lost a stone and a half in weight, and when I got back I was the thinnest I've ever been.

On my travels I met a beautiful girl from Dortmund called Britta Biernoth who worked in the travel agents in Duisburg, and by a process of hanging around in her shop asking pointless travel questions that I didn't really want to know the answers to, I got to know her well enough to ask her out for coffee.  It was Britta who stopped me taking sugar in tea and I always remember her surname because it means 'the necessity of beer'.  I used to meet her on my days off and sometimes we'd go out for lunch, and one day I went to Dortmund with her to look at Leeds Square (I'd been to Dortmund Square in Leeds and I wanted to match up the two).  It wasn't a romance though.  She was a few years older than me and she had no shortage of male admirers, most of whom were at least 6 foot 5 and drove Porsches or bought her diamond earrings, but we got on pretty well.  Come to think of it, the guy with the Porsche might have bought himself the diamond earring, I can't remember now.  

When I left Germany after the 3 months, I stayed at her parents' house in Dortmund the night before, and caught the bus home from there.  Her mum gave me a lift to the bus station and on the way pointed out all the buildings that had been newly built after the war because the Allied bombing had destroyed the ones that were there before.  

Apart from being a bit lonely while I was there, I was pretty happy on the whole, and being there with only what I could put in a suitcase for 3 months made me realise how little stuff we actually need.  

There's some stuff I like having, like plates and bikes and cups and forks and shoes and things to sit on, but I only like having stuff that gets used regularly.  I can't stand keeping things that never see the light of day.  Which is why I'm always trying to throw stuff I don't use away.  It's tricky living with other people though, because sometimes I want to throw their stuff away as well.

One thing I do know though.  I'd take experiences over possessions every time.