Day 11.5 - Plans Change Part I Still in Chichester it's dinner time, Greek food - yum! We have to decide if we want to avoid Dover and Calais as we have an opportunity to catch a ferry from Newhaven (tomorrow's destination) to Dieppe in France if we want to. The conversation is robust and no decision is made over dinner. Instead we go back to our room and first try to book accommodation in Newhaven. That's where we hit our first snag - we couldn't find anything that suited us at all (2 beds, plus bike storage). The only things available were way out of town or way too expensive. We restarted the conversation about going to Dieppe on the ferry. We looked at available ferries - we could get on a ferries at either ... read more

Day 10 - To the Manor Born Our destination for today was Chilworth. It's an outer suburb of Southampton. We decided there's no point going all the way into Southampton which is quite a big city if we were just going to move on the next morning. Distance today is 44 miles or about 70kms. The George Inn was very comfortable (for me as I had the double bed) and a little less so for Jeff (on the roll out bed), Food at the pub was a bit hit and miss but still a nice place to stay. We left via National Route 24 which provided such magnificent riding yesterday and this morning it didn't disappoint. Quiet roads with fields all around, some with corn, some grass for hay, and other with vegies of some sort. ... read more

An early start to the day had us heading off our planned course to something that has been on Jeff's Bucket List (since yesterday) - going to the river head of the River Thames just out of Kemble. Crickdale is fairly close to Kemble so we head out that way to start the day. The last 500m is on grass and dirt (ugh!). The river head itself is an ancient wall with water holes at the bottom (photo not included). To think this is the source of the mighty river that flows through London is amazing. From Kemble we turned south west to the city of Bristol. This will be our launching place for Bath tomorrow which is only about 20kms away. We have seen a number of "road kill" on the roads but the site ... read more

Reunited in Reading, Jeff was exhausted by the time he got back with his passport. It was a late dinner (Afghan Restaurant) and then turn in for the night. when on his own yesterday, Jeff worked out he could navigate using the MapMe App without a WiFi signal and so today Jeff would be leading and doing the navigating. We left the Abbey Motel at 8:30am, destination Oxford, some 55kms away. The route via MapMe took us onto an overgrown dirt track just outside Reading, which was a little damp. We had only gone about 80 meters where our path was blocked by a fallen tree with no getting past. Some ladies walking in the opposite direction advised we could push out through the bushes into an adjoining golf course and ride past the obstruction and ... read more

Another early morning. Need to get accustomed to it being light at 4:30am! Our plans for a warm up ride soon took a back seat to all that we realised we still needed to get done before we leave. I had 15 things on my list without trying too hard. We made a trip to a couple of bike shops for some last minute items. We went back to Bob's cafe where we siphoned WiFi on Sunday, this time for the coffee, not the WiFi. We also visited a Tesco Express to get some food supplies. While shopping we noticed if we had a Tesco Loyalty Membership it was a significantly cheaper shop. I tried both the Tesco App and their website to join, but it seems non-residents didn't qualify. At this point, the check out ... read more