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| Our Sunday night hotel. Great food, nice rooms and friendly staff. James sure knows how to pick 'em! |
Today was an odd but nice day, spent in between a tranquil morning along the farmlands and a busy afternoon in traffic along downtown streets.
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| Like sentinels standing guard over the fields. Hayhenge? |
We left the lovely small town of Hungerford earlier than usual this morning. After one long climb, we were soon back out in the alfalfa fields.
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| A lovely locale for lunch; a serendipitous meeting with fellow cyclists. Not a bad place to have a rest stop. |
In and out of a number of small villages, we kept up a pretty good pace through much of the morning. Our last small village was in Fordingbridge, where we stopped for lunch along the Avon river (yes, the same Avon where Will Shakespeare penned his works in Stratford-on-Avon).
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| One of the many thatched-roof wonders we passed along today's ride. |
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| Salisbury Cathedral |
Serendipity always seems to appear on this kinds of trips (some readers may remember the English cyclist who rode with us on the California leg of the Cross Country challenge running into her sister's best friend from the UK, who just happened to be going in the opposite direction on a rock band tour of the States). Today's version happened during lunch. As I was going back to the parking lot to grab something from my bike, I ran into a couple walking their dog. They inquired about our ride, wondering where we were going. When I told them Portugal, the wife said that her husband was going to go on a long-distance ride in the United States next summer. Guess which company he signed up with? Yes, America By Bicycle! Although they were ready to leave the restaurant, I strongly suggested they come back to the outdoor patio along the river where we were eating in order to meet Michelle, Jane and Gene and get more information about his upcoming ride. They did and spent the next twenty minutes peppering our ride-leader trio with all sorts of information about the ride. See, ya never know what will happen when you talk to total strangers :-)
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Stonehenge, photo from
the nearby highway. |
After lunch, we rode through Salisbury. Although it wasn't on the route sheet, I insisted on stopping by Salisbury Cathedral. It was worth the quick visit. And, as we were approaching Salisbury, Jesse had realized that we were also fairly close to Stonehenge. So, the group, as a whole, got a full dose of organized and mystic religions today.
After Salisbury, it was straight south to reach Poole. If we weren't aware of where we were, the greeting with got from the seagulls certainly gave away our location.
On a mechanical note, I got the group's first flat tire today...a mere 1.5 miles away from today's rest stop. Oh well.
An early day tomorrow, as we board the Poole ferry to Cherbourg at 7:45 am. Time for bed.
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