June 9, 2024
Here comes the unicycle...
Arrival at the pointy end
Well, there's not much I can do to back out now. We're a seagull's swoop from the start line.
Today, we dropped the dogs off, reconfigured the rear seats, and carefully deposited four small touring bags and one large bicycle into the car's newly-enlarged void. Inevitably, the front wheel (bike, not car) had to come off to fit things in, although I'm relatively confident that even my limited mechanical skills should stretch to reattaching it by the time the tour starts. Otherwise, we're in for 950 miles of wheelie position. No amount of padding in the shorts would make that a bearable prospect.
The plan was for an overnight stay close to Land's End, and a Monday morning start to the cycle odyssey. (I have to say, I'm finding post-retirement Monday options are so much more fulfilling). So anyway, we pointed the car west towards St Just, and hit the road.
It's a shade over two hours from our house to the tip of Cornwall, where the ride begins. Although the motorway network stops just north of us, there are fast major roads almost until we reach the far west. There's been a lot of construction in recent times to upgrade the route, although it remains patchy between Truro, Cornwall's last - and only - city, and the large town of Penzance which sits 30 miles beyond, near the far end of the peninsula. One day, they just might do something about that bit of road, but after Penzance, there's as much chance of road upgrades as there is of flying giraffes. The countryside here is less populated, maybe even slightly less visited, and the landscape is scarred with the evidence of historical mining. The final stretch of road to St Just, where we're staying overnight, is hilly, windy, and testifies to the fierce Cornish antipathy to settlers. While the UK still has many long, straight roads, a legacy of roman construction, the centurions were very much dissuaded by natives long before they got this far west. Instead, the roads lurch around drunkenly as if to link as many houses as possible, leaving no-one out.
Arriving late afternoon, we stopped for a brief leg-stretch in Penzance, which was largely closed for business this late in Sunday. From there, we moved quickly on to the golf and country club at Cape Cornwall, where we were staying for the night. I'm not sure how good the course is, although it was clearly very popular. Personally, I was concerned by the sign at reception, warning in unequivocal terms of adders on the course. I guess it all adds to the challenge: once you can deal comfortably with bunkers and water hazards, poisonous snakes seem like an obvious next step. Mrs M and I, not being particularly of the plus-fours persuasion, or indeed much practised at snake-charming, opted for a dunk in the pool instead.
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To close the day, we decided to pop out for dinner and ended up fitting in rather more than we'd anticipated. Fish and chips seemed like the obvious way for a bit of preparatory carb-loading, and of course it's empirical fact that our national dish tastes better eaten at the beach. So we drifted down to Sennen Cove, to watch turquoise waves rolling in from the Atlantic, before driving a few miles along the coast off to my favourite beach a few miles away. Porthcurno is such an amazing place, not just for its stunning bay, but for its improbable history as a hub of global communication. From here, the first undersea telegraph cables revolutionised our ability to message America and beyond, and a small army of telecomms engineers was trained to support various empire outposts. And I always wonder how the Minack theatre, which sits immediately adjacent to the beach here, isn't more widely known. You'll have to google it for images, but it's a breathtakingly beautiful natural theatre, chiselled and moulded into the side of the cliff by a single woman and her gardener. She spent her days (and nights) recovering sand, wreckage and other materials from the beach below, transporting them up the cliff via a long and winding series of vertiginous steps which she made herself.
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Last stop of the day was a quick recce of tomorrow's starting line. Land's End is a pretty dreadful tourist abomination, and it's not now generally possible to get a photograph by the famous sign unless you pay for the privilege. Or, unless you nip along after they've all gone home. We managed to snatch a quick joint photo, but tomorrow's ride will kick off with a snap outside of the complex, at the official start line. I'm also planning for it to include a bicycle, with two wheels.
With luck, the wheel won't be coming off again this trip.
And now to bed. Tomorrow, the adventure begins.
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