My father still lives in the old family home in the village of Pembrey in Carmarthenshire, south Wales. This was too far to cycle in the time available but the plan was to get as far as we could and then get a train the rest of the way.
When cycling we prefer the back roads, for obvious reasons, but just as in a car one makes much better time on the main roads and as there was no alternative out of Christchurch in our direction that's the way we went. We had coffee in Wimbourne Minster and lunch at Blandford Forum stopping just outside Shaftesbury on Day one.
Day two saw similarly good progress and saw us just outside Bath, having followed the Kennet & Avon towpath from Dundas Aqueduct into the city. I had read about the problems of continuous moorers on this stretch and was expecting an unbroken line of moored boats. However although there were plenty here that pretty obviously rarely, if ever, move it wasn't as bad as I'd thought and there was certainly room on most of the official visitor moorings.
Despite the staff at Bath's major camping shop having no idea of the whereabouts, or even existence, of any local camp sites we eventually found one just three miles outside the city. Arriving wet, tired and hungry and not having bought any provisions for an evening meal we scraped something together from the meagre range available at the camp shop commenting to the cashier as we did so that it was pretty desperate fare but would have to do. Imagine our surprise then when after taking us through a laborious and obviously scripted booking-in procedure she ended by saying "and the on-site pub and restaurant is behind this building!
There then followed a ten-minute argument when they refused to take back the food we'd bought just two minutes earlier as we intended to eat in their restaurant instead. We had everything from "it's not our policy to give refunds" to "the computer won't let us do it" but they were no match for two cyclists would had just covered 50 hilly miles in wind and rain and we got our refund - all £4.77 of it - after whichIi walked out of the shop with half the stuff we'd bought still in my pockets! (I took it back).
2 comments:
I'm enjoying thinking how sheepish you'd have been if, when you went to the restaurant, you found they'd run out of food and had to go back and buy that food again!
I was cycle camping in Cornwall years ago, at one campsite I was asked by the booking in bimbo if I wanted mains hook up.
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