September 30, 2022
Day 25: Shifnal to Shrewsbury
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As I ferried our stuff along the convoluted corridors of the Park Hotel, and out to Reception, I had a chance to look at the elegant, period appearance of the place. There was the dining room, where soon we would take our breakfast, the cozy sitting room, with leather chairs, and many meeting rooms. The bikes, as often happens, had the best of these facilities, better than our own room.
It's an old and tired story now about the weakness of the British breakfast, but I was struck especially this time on opening the gleaming stainless serving vessels in this elegant hotel to find in one a vat of baked beans, and in another a stack of previously frozen, triangular, so called hashed browns. I wonder, did someone like the Queen actually eat this dreck? Maybe. The people here seem to think it's great.
(Ok, I checked. The Queen seems to have preferred cereal and yogurt. But again, she was not trying to cycle over hill and dale on that.)
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As we passed through Shifnal, we did spot this one 17th century building, and a poster board described several more old or interesting structures that are scattered around. Typically every town has a few such things, but you have to look for them.
Today was sunny (at first) and not too cool. We were heading a reasonably short distance to the place in England that Dodie most wanted to see, and there were not even any hills in our way. So we were happy and optimistic as we set off.
It took the usual twenty or thirty minutes to fight our way out of town and to begin to find some roads where we could actually get a cycling rhythm. I did get the one shot below, before the whole thing came unraveled:
We passed a few "Road Closed" signs, of the type we usually ignore, but a few kms down we found not only the road closed, but the landscape ripped up by construction for acres.
We scanned the GPS for a way out, but the basic geographic fact of this area is that it is dominated by the M54 Motorway (equivalent to an Interstate, except that even with this, the English have no shoulders on the road). At first, we simply could see no way to Shrewsbury, other than the absolutely out of the question Motorway.
Well, we took to scouting around, and following this lead and that. Eventually, we came upon the NCN sign below. Saved? Not quite. It still took hours to get on some sort of stable and properly signed route towards Shrewsbury. By hours, I mean four hours. Yes, four hours, during which we travelled 10 km. At one point we did get on to some sort of a bike path. This was not only short, but it featured more than one of those annoying barricades. Another path had a barricade every block - not quite the annoying type, but a barricade nonetheless.
The part that wore us down the most was the continual crossing of roads or roundabouts, either with those pedestrian signals, or at official cross walks, of just bushwacking across. The needed amount of this was just downright dangerous, and we reminded ourselves to stay extra alert.
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2 years ago
We did finally get straightened away a bit, and began to make some progress. We even saw a few typical houses, and now that it is October, some Fall colours.
The Severn River is a big feature of the Shrewsbury area, since the river loops around the town. So it was encouraging when we reached the Severn, and by the time we were at the weir in the river, we had basically arrived at the town.
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Dodie had booked a place near the train station in Shrewsbury, which is also near the Castle. That sounded like a nice central choice. As we drew near, I took a photo of the "castle", but Dodie chided me, because that was actually the train station. It's hard to tell, sometimes.
Dodie had been eagerly anticipating getting a booklet she had read about, apparently available at the tourist Information, that contained a guided walk through the various Brother Cadfael sites in and around the town. But with all the cycling delays, we arrived at the TI at 4:15, 15 minutes after closing. They are open tomorrow at 11, but even if they do have the book, that's half the day gone.
We did stop in to a bookstore, but though they did have lots of local history and geography stuff, they did not have the thing we were looking for.
Oh well, we can also make our own tour if need be.
Just walking to the TI, we did not spot any Cadfael locations, but there were a fair number of medieval looking buildings:
We are staying over in Shrewsbury tomorrow to continue the Brother Cadfael quest.
p.s. Did you know (do you care) that Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury? The Town Council put up this statue in honour of it:
Today's ride: 42 km (26 miles)
Total: 887 km (551 miles)
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2 years ago