Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux
This day sucked! I knew that I was to expect nasty weather, but I did not know that the road would be so screwed up once again, and that I would get totally lost at the back of beyond in the middle of nowhere! I do not know what kind of an idiot wrote the opencyclomap for that area, but it could not be more confusing! Not only I was totally perplexed with the real marking vs. the marking on my map, but the situation got worse in the moment when local bike roads stepped in. Even though unpleasant, getting lost would have been perfectly OK if there the screwed Atlantic wind had not blown like crazy that you could ride your bike only 10 km/h and even that only with valiant effort. It was not as on the bridge, where one could not ride a bike at all in, but it was really extremely unpleasant. Today's weather played a nasty game with me as well because I got splashed by heavy rain for several times without any chance to take cover. I would have normally sucked it up, gone to the nearest café and enjoyed a break, but that was simply not possible as there were no cafés around. I was riding through abandoned places near the Atlantic seashore where one could barely see some fishermen houses and shipyards. Some places did not really resembled human dwellings, even though the pestilent smell of garbage was a clear sign that they really are. You could only dream of any touristic or commercial buildings there.
As if it
were not enough, my precious bike map let me high and dry as well (rather wet
in this case). According to the map, I was supposed to go 1 km on a bike route
and then pass a canal. In reality, there was no route, not even a lane, and I almost
got a stroke when I arrived exhausted and found out that there was neither a
bridge, nor a ferry to take me through that stupid canal. When I realized that
I was hoping mad both out of hopelessness and anger. The only chance was to
push my bike for another 2 km on an imaginary lane to connect to a normal road.
On this normal road, I got lost again (it did not surprise me anymore) and it
took quite some time until I found another decent connection to the Velocean. I
was pissed off as never! I do not know what kind of a prank this bike road was … .
For my
lunch break, I stashed my belongings between two old buildings that was
not particularly clean (garbage and broken glass all over the place), but at
least I was covered from the wind from two sides. My things were therefore
blown away by the wind only 5 times, my bike with its super-solid bike stand
only 2 times and luckily I did not even need to undertake any special
search action to obtain them back. The very same minutes I finished my
quick lunch at 4:30 pm (I could not find a cover by that time and was
extremely hungry by then), a menacingly looking thunderstorm appeared on
the sky. It was coming right towards me and since there was no place to hide,
I was left with only one option: ride on and get straight into the rainy
hell. This scenario repeated for several times until I reached
a place where I took my dinner and later decided to build my camp. I
felt so exhausted as the first days of my travel, but still it was not so bad
as then. Just a pity that all my things are totally soaked and I have
nothing to change.
No comments:
Post a Comment