Heart

0

Comment

0

Link

Log in to comment or reply

THE PYRENEES were put there to stop the French and Spanish bickering. It's hard to call each other names when you have to climb to a mountain top to do it. But such was the distrust that each showed of the other, especially and justifiably the Spanish towards the French, that for a century there was no train line between the two.

Or, to be more accurate, there was - but right on the border the rails moved closer or further apart, depending on which direction you were looking. The Spanish side was narrower, and in some instances still is, because Spain didn't care to have French troops trundling into the country by train and then not going away again.

The Pyrenees are mysterious mountains. Most days you see them only when you're just a couple of hours' ride away. The rest of the time, air currents hide them and it's a surprise when you spot their flanks. The early explorers must have been astounded, rushing back to Paris to say they'd been to a place where the land suddenly veered to the sky.

I live a couple of hundred kilometres from the mountains and getting a glimpse of them is held to announce a change in the weather, usually for the worse.

My plan is to ride from there to Calais, the Channel port that was part of England when people were less fussy about borders. That's 10 days of pedalling. From there I'll take the ferry to Dover and ride on to a Kentish village called Lenham, where Steph will be staying with her mother.

There's no great ambition to ride across London, one of the biggest and busiest cities in the world and two days on a bike from the southern suburbs to the north, so we'll entrust our fate to railway companies (unwise in the view of Victorian travel writers) and head for Milton Keynes.

Milton Keynes was once guaranteed to bring a smile of ridicule or regret. It is a New Town, meaning that planners took a huge area to the side of the existing town of Bletchley and built a new city which it named after one of the pleasant villages it devoured.

Milton Keynes was laid out in a grid, common in America but alien in Europe. That alone gave the place a reputation for boredom and repetitiveness.

Bletchley is still there, though, with its own identity. And right next to the station is the country house which was the secret centre after 1939 for the cracking of German codes, It happens also to be the birthplace of the world's first mechanical computer and, thanks to an unsung hero called Tommy Flowers,of the world's first programmable electronic computer.

It is a museum now, the original computer rebuilt (Churchill, who made as many stupid decisions as wise ones, had them largely destroyed). Steph and I have always wanted to go there and so has the effervescent Karen Cook. So we will meet at Milton Keynes station and our journeys will begin from there.