The Road to Yeovil

That. That was a journey and a half.

For the thirty eight miles from Salisbury to Sherborne, everything went fine. Sure, my phone was less well charged than I'd like - having to share sockets in the hostel meant I'd had to prioritise my bike battery, so I'd started out on only 48% phone power - but I had my paper route instructions with me, the sun was shining, the lambs were frolicking in the fields, and all was well.

I was getting tired by that 38 mile mark, though. I'd wanted to stop halfway for lunch, but I forgot to fill my thermos flask this morning, and without a hot drink my hardtack was inedible. Around one o' clock I passed a pub that was serving Sunday lunch in a little village just outside Shaftesbury, but it was £11, and I figured I'd wait till I was in Shaftesbury proper and just grab a Subway or something. Alas, my route did not take me into Shaftesbury proper. I ended up buying a ham sandwich at a petrol station in Milborne Port at half past two, and wolfing it down on the side of the road.

I found somewhere to sit for ten minutes after that, and burned some of my remaining phone battery on looking at Facebook. It was okay; I was nearly at Sherborne now and there were only another eight miles to go. When the battery dipped below 20%, I lost mobile data, and I started feeling cold to boot, so I got back on the road. It wasn't worth taking a proper break, I was nearly there.

As I came out the other side of Sherborne, Florence's battery warning light began to flash. I noted it, but I wasn't too concerned. I was pretty sure she could still get me there. But I wasn't sure if I was leaving Sherborne on the right road, and I couldn't check googlemaps without my mobile data. The signposts for Yeovil all pointed to the A30, and I knew I wasn't supposed to take the A30, so I ignored them and kept going.

Pretty soon I found myself facing a long uphill stretch. I looked at Florence's blinking light. If this was the wrong way, it was going to cost me more in battery power than I could afford. I fished out my phone and started rifling through the settings, looking for a way to turn off the Low Battery Mode that was keeping me from using my mobile data.

By the time I found it and gained access to googlemaps, my phone was on 13% battery.

But it was okay. I was on the wrong road, but I hadn't strayed far, and if I just kept going ahead to the north, took the next left, and then turned left again before I reached the A30, then I'd be back on the route of my paper instructions and everything would be fine. I hurriedly switched off my phone, stood up on my pedals and had at the hill. Florence did not pass out on me, and I enjoyed the compensation of an equally long downhill on the other side.

Just as I was starting to be concerned that I'd somehow missed my turning, a left turn finally presented itself and led me up and down another hill. I glanced anxiously at the battery light, but Florence was still holding out. A while after that hill I reached a crossroads, and stopped. I felt uneasy. I could still see no sign of the A30, and I didn't remember seeing a crossroads on googlemaps. But here one was, complete with quaint wooden signpost painted white. The sign for Yeovil was pointing back the way I'd come.

Out came the phone again. I loaded googlemaps and stared at it in confusion. (Twelve percent.) I turned it this way and that. I scrolled southwards to find Sherborne behind me, but it wasn't there. I scrolled northwards to try and find the A30 ahead of me (eleven percent), and just as I gave up, Sherborne slid down into the top of my screen.

I regarded it in utter bafflement. I traced the route I'd taken out of Sherborne and located the spot where I'd last checked googlemaps, when I was looking up at that long hill. (Ten percent.) And then all at once I saw what I'd done. I'd seen that I just needed to "continue along" the road running north, but I hadn't checked my own position. I'd been on the wrong side of the road, facing south. And I'd just kept going.

I looked back over my shoulder with a sense of impending horror. My rear horizon was the hill I'd just come down. The other, longer hill lay behind it. My final eight miles had just become twelve. I looked down at Florence, and she blinked her little red light at me lazily, as much as if to say that her impending power failure was going to be my problem, not hers.

I switched my phone off quickly before it could drop to nine percent. I looked at the hill again, and swore aloud. But there was nothing for it but to turn Florence about and start back towards that hill, and up it, and over it.

I took to turning off her battery at every opportunity. Any time the road was downhill or level, I let Florence rest and I used my leg power. My legs had already done forty miles, and they were tired. We moved slower and slower with every mile, Florence still graciously assisting with the uphill stretches.

I passed a sign to Yeovil that read 3 miles, and kept going. A mile later - Yeovil, 3 miles. Had I entered the Twilight Zone? Was this the Zeno's Paradox of cycle routes? We went down, down, down into a gully, then up, up, up the other side. It was ridiculously steep. Round a corner, and up. Round another corner, and up. I stood up on the pedals with my legs burning, trying to provide the majority of the power myself, extolling Florence's virtues between my teeth all the while. And still her little motor whirred on and her little red light went blink-blink-blink. Surely she could not last much longer.

I turned onto Yeovil Road, which became Sandhurst road and ran gently uphill for a stretch. And right at the crest of that hill, the little blinking light went out, and the whirring died away into silence. I patted her handlebars - It's okay. You did good, kid. I knew I must be quite close now, and I just hoped there wasn't much more uphill for me to deal with. Florence was now incredibly heavy and sluggish, and my legs were exhausted. I didn't want to taste the bitter defeat of having to get off and push.

There was a T-junction just ahead. I pulled over at the kerb, meaning to check my written directions, but then a street sign almost opposite caught my eye: Forest Hill. My heart leapt. I knew Forest Hill. The house I was heading to was on a road adjoining it. My destination was less than two minutes away, and it was all downhill from here.

My eyes may have misted over slightly as I patted Florence's handlebars again. She'd done it. She'd kept it together in the face of my human ineptitude. She'd bravely carried us all the way to the top of the final rise, and then fainted dead away from exhaustion. I'm going to have to buy her something nice to express my gratitude when we get back to Bristol. Some handlebar streamers perhaps, or a nice tall flag.

I'm too tired to write anything else now. Tomorrow's journey will be almost as far as today's and I fear I'll be starting out at the kind of disadvantage where everything hurts before I'm even on the bike. I'm to bed; goodnargle.

The Road to Salisbury

It's half past five in the evening, I'm in a warm and comfortable hostel, and I'm about ready to eat something and turn in for the night. It's been a good day, and boy am I tired!

I learned to tighten my brake levers this morning, when I noticed one of them was getting loose and wobbly. It necessitated unhitching the brake cable and resetting it afterwards, so as a bonus I also learned how to adjust my brake cables. And all before breakfast!

I got on the road about ten and made it to Stonehenge about half past twelve. It was cold and windy on Salisbury Plain and I was glad I'd packed my warmest woolly pully. I went to see the stones of course, and looked around the visitors' centre, including the 360 degree surround cinematic of the stones through the ages and in different weather conditions. It was pretty excellent!

From there it was only another hour to Salisbury. I can definitely do a longer journey than this in a day, and so can Florence; her battery is still at 50% charge. I could have conceivably done Melksham to Salisbury in the morning, stopped for lunch, and then gone ahead and done Salisbury to Yeovil in the afternoon.

Today's lesson is, I am better at this than I realised! I guess I can increase the amount of distance I cover each day when I cycle up to York. I can probably do it in three days instead of four! Yeah, I'm gonna get into googlemaps and figure that out.

Riiiight after dinner. *tummygrowl*

The Road to Melksham

Good evening, humans of the internet! I'm pleased to report that day one of being on the road was a success.

The first unexpected challenge was: trying to get on the bike. (Stop laughing.) Florence is a bit too big for me really, so I usually mount her by leaning her to the left (towards me), swinging my right leg over the back wheel, and plunking myself onto the saddle while pushing off with my left foot and starting to pedal with my right. I'm so well-practiced in that manoeuvre, I do it effortlessly now, without thinking about it. When I tried it this morning, Florence's front wheel left the ground as her back end nose-dived sideways, and I only just managed to catch her before she hit the deck. Heaving her back upright was a struggle, too. With the battery and two packed-full panniers all hugging the back wheel, she's achieved a monstrously uneven weight distribution. I tried again, being more careful, but it just wasn't possible to hold her by the handlebars at an angle with all that weight at her back end. I had to roll her into the gutter and mount her from the kerb.

I could really feel the extra weight when I cornered at the bottom of the street; it presented as a barely-controlled and somewhat alarming wobble just behind me. It felt like Florence was gestating a whole new bicycle in her arse. But by the time we were putting Bedminster behind us, my sense of balance was getting the measure of the situation. The corner-wobbles became less dramatic, and then disappeared altogether. And the weight didn't seem to slow me down any - thanks to a combination of my hard-won Amazon thighs and the battery being back in action, we were making a smooth and easy ten miles an hour or so on the flat. And she could do faster, easily - but I have to keep the battery on its lowest power setting for such long journeys, else it will run flat before I get where I'm going.

The rest of the journey was reasonably uneventful. I know the route to Melksham - my dad lives here - so there was no navigational work to do, only thirty miles of straight riding in pleasantly cool and occasionally drizzly weather. Tomorrow will be forty miles, and more of a navigational challenge. I have driven from Melksham to Salisbury by car before, once. It was many years ago, and I was trying to get to Yeovil, and it all went a bit wrong. Hopefully I'll have better luck tomorrow...

The Backstory

Last July, I bought myself an electric bike to get about on, so I wouldn't have to catch buses anymore. I named her Florence and you can see pictures of her here, courtesy of her creator. I've been riding her to work and back ever since - it's seven miles each way and gently uphill in the morning, but that doesn't matter when your steel friend is doing all the work. We did that seven miles in about forty minutes.

I don't recall exactly when the idea hit me, but as soon as it did, I knew it for what it was. It was The Next Big Thing, like my year in Canada had been. I'm going to go to the US Midwest and retrace the journeys of Laura Ingalls Wilder on an electric bike, visiting all the historic sites along the way. It's going to be a few thousand miles, and it's going to take me a few months to do it all.

I got into Little House on the Prairie through the show. I caught it a couple of times on Channel 4 on days when I was home from school sick, back in the nineties. The first I ever saw of it was a snippet that I now recognise as being from The Wolves in season four. I liked the look of that girl in the treehouse in her no-nonsense dark green dress and pigtails; she looked like exactly the kind of girl I would want for a best friend. But it looked like a pretty old show, not very fast-paced, and when I found a much-loved cartoon on another channel I flicked over. Probably several months later, I caught the latter half of the episode where little "Kerry" (to my English ears) fell down the well, and I was glued to the screen for a solid half hour, but I didn't realise the show was a series - I assumed the part I'd seen before with Laura in the treehouse must have been near the beginning of "the movie".

Ten years ago, season one came out on DVD in the UK. I was an adult by then, and I spotted it in HMV, recognised the characters from "that cool movie I'd seen once" and gave it a google. I realised it had been a TV show all along, and I found out the show was loosely based on a series of children's books written by Laura herself about her childhood in the 1800s. I'd enjoyed my history A-level and this idea of the personal historical narrative of a young girl from days gone by really got my attention. I bought season one, watched it through in a week, and requested a complete box set of the books from my parents for Christmas. I devoured them all in less than a month. I've re-read them several times since, and continued to buy the DVDs up to season five. (There were nine seasons all told, but in my opinion the show jumped the shark after season four and I couldn't bring myself to keep going after season six, which I watched on YouTube back in the day when you still could.)

When I noticed IMDb being a thing in 2008 or so, I got onto the Little House message boards and started comparing thoughts and opinions with other fans. (Shout out to bill3 and danagolightly! This here piemakergirl remembers you both fondly :3) Some of the other fans were very knowledgeable and I learned a lot. It turned out that some of the early storylines in the show, ones that I assumed were complete fiction, were actually based on real events of the Ingalls family's life that Laura hadn't included in her books. That was when I started googling to find out about the real Laura. I wanted to know how much had been left out of her novels, and how much of the content she had fictionalised. I wanted to know the real story.

I found out Laura had first written an autobiography of her childhood as a single volume for adults called Pioneer Girl, which she had kept completely faithful to the truth as she remembered it, but the manuscript had been rejected by publishers.  She then reworked the story of her childhood into the now famous fictionalised series for children.  I discovered that a microfilm copy of her original Pioneer Girl manuscript resided at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in Iowa, and I emailed them to ask if it was possible to get some kind of copy sent to me (I was willing to pay), but nobody replied.

Last summer, I found out about the Pioneer Girl project and became unreasonably excited.  My pre-ordered copy of Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography arrived just before Christmas, but I'd already started planning my trip long before then.

I'm not sure quite when this passing interest exploded into a full-blown obsession, but apparently it has happened.

So I figured, I'm going to need to prepare for this.  I can't just jet over to the States and jump on a bike and start zooming around in the middle of the Midwestern nowhere, with no available support network, on the assumption that everything will work out fine.  I need to set a time scale for building up to this, and start training - not even so much in terms of physical endurance (I mean, see "electric bike", right) but more in terms of knowing that I've thought of everything I need in terms of food and water and clothes and storage space, or in terms of bike repair skills, or of places to stay.  I need to be confident I have everything covered before I actually go.

I need to do a series of increasingly challenging trial runs.

I'm setting the big trip for the summer of 2017.  That gives me two years to make ready and to save up for what it will cost me, and it's also the year of Laura Ingalls Wilder's 150th birthday, which feels appropriate.  Some of the historical sites might have special celebrations going on that year, and it would be excellent to get to see them.

So next summer in 2016, I'm going to do as long a cycle trip as I can manage within my holiday allowance for work, on this side of the Atlantic, to really prepare myself.  It'll be two or three weeks, and I'll cycle to either Scotland or Germany, I haven't decided yet.

This year, I have two shorter trips planned.  Towards the end of the summer, I'm going to cycle from my home city of Bristol up to a friend's house in Yorkshire.  I reckon it will take me about five days, cycling by day and couchsurfing or hostelling by night.  And for my very first trip, as a low-risk starter project in case there's any kind of problem I've not forseen, I'm going to stay close to home.  I'm going to cycle around the Westcountry for four days, from Bristol to Melksham to Salisbury to Yeovil and back to Bristol again.  It'll be 32-42 miles per day, and I'm setting off in about two hours.

In preparation, I took my battery off my bike for Lent.  I've been cycling my fourteen mile return commute under actual legpower for the past six weeks, and although it was horrendous at first, my thighs are like twin rocks now.  I am ready for this.  The battery goes back on today, on low power only because it's a long trip, and it's going to be about 50/50 battery power and thigh power.  I think I can I think I can I think I can.

This is what this blog is about.  I'll be writing about my daily adventures in the evenings, when I've reached my destination for the night and plugged my phone into a power supply.  I have googlemaps in my pocket, I've baked hardtack for the journey and I'm ready to roll.

Catch you in the evening!