A bicycle made for two
Three days worth of Camping Holiday in Britain and it`s rained reasonably consistently. Must admit it doesn`t entirely seem like we`re getting away from it all - as we chose to start our travels on the Easter weekend, everywhere is mobbed. On the upside, at least we`re not being held up by bloody caravans all the time now.
I know I`m generally metric, but the car puts these figures in miles, and I have to confess to still secretly measuring fuel consumption in mpg. Come to think of it, I`m not even sure what the metric equivalent is.
Distance travelled so far: 160 miles
Average fuel consumption: 18 mpg
Fuel consumption is rather what we expected. In fact, umm, it`s significantly better than my Mazda RX7 was. I think we`re somewhat over the maximum towing weight of the caravan but it`s actually towing fine, probably because the car is fine towing anything up to the size of the average bungalow. Despite horrendous wind yesterday when we started off, towing has generally been okay... I`m not normally nervous driving anything, but it`s taking some getting used to the size of the caravan, mostly when you`ve ended up on a country road with giant ditches on either side and a truck coming the other way. I`m going to have a good bit of practice at this, so I imagine I`ll be an expert just as we get to the countries with the worst drivers.
We had a dinner of Moet & Chandon and Spanikopita (Greek feta cheese pie, as I`m sure you`re aware) last night, to celebrate the start of our jolly. We might have had something a bit more feast-like, if I wasn`t still vegetarian for Orthodox Lent. I`m allowed to eat fish on Sunday, then next Sunday we`re suppose to spit-roast a sheep. I`ve checked the caravan and there doesn`t seem to be any spit-roasting gear included, so we may have to improvise. I`m told a whole sheep isn`t easily purchased in the Lake District, so we may have to stop in at a pet shop on the way and see what they`ve got.
We hired a tandem today. I thought we were going to get about 100m on the thing before having to take it back but actually it was remarkeably easy. We didn`t fall off once, though we had a couple of ungraceful stops. It`s quite a good way to travel as you can balance out the effort during the trip if one of you is an attractive, slender athlete and the other one is a bit dumpy. We followed the prescribed route around 20km, with a rather long pub stop on the way. My attempts to get Kiki to take a photo from the back of it failed, so you`ll have to make do with one of me standing next to it. It`s actually remarkeably good if you`re trying to follow a prescribed route, because the person on the back can read the map. I`m going to try and upload the data from this Garmin Forerunner thing at some point, so you can have the joy of watching exactly what happens to my heart rate when I am sitting eating chips.
We`re off to North Devon tomorrow (Watchett). Autoroute tells me it`ll take two hours, so it`ll probably take three.