NORTH SEA SUMMER

After sampling the local beer the night before I felt I should visit the home of the brewery, Jever. It was a hot morning and the route wound though flat, green farmland crisscrossed by wide drainage ditches. East Frisian landscape It was very like any flat, fenny landscape on the east coast of Britain, except for the German farmhouses. I guess their similarity to each other has something to do with them all being built on reclaimed land - it was the same in Denmark. I only needed to photograph one, because they all looked like this one, more or less. Jever had plenty of shops and cafes -a pleasant small rural town. By the time I left it was very hot, and when I reached the coast again at Harleseil I realised it was too hot to cycle further. I didn't even have the energy to visit the dyke museum, but instead cycled a few kilometres along the coast to Neuharlingenseil where I put my tent up on another vast campsite and sat under my umbrella trying to stay cool. I ga...

Somewhere in Frisland someone told me I'd find the farming very different in Holland. They were right. I left Bad Nieuwschens and at once I was in a landscape of vast fields of wheat, barley and sugar beet. There were dykes and polders and sluices, and long rows of trees silhouetted black against the sky. And in the distance were the towers and chimneys of Delfzijl. Approaching Delfzijl I didn't much enjoy cycling past the chemical factories. The industrial part of the town seemed to go on for a long time and I think I must have lost the cycle route at some point. North of the town was more farmland and I stopped for lunch in a field where a friendly farmer found me as he hoed the sugar beet. I was hoping to get to Vierhuisen where I was going to meet Kate and spend a week exploring Groningen, but the wind was strong and against me, so I spent the night in a campsite at Pieterburen which is famous for its seal sanctuary and for Wad-loping, which means frolicking in th...

I woke at 6.00AM to a sky covered with small cumulus clouds and a fresh North-East wind. By the time I set off the sky had cleared and the wind was already veering to the South. The first part of the day was like cycling through the Lincolnshire fens: dykes, polders, rivers, fields of bare earth, flooded fields, fields of lilies and alliums. Then I hit the dunes and turned due South into the wind. It was hard work and made me feel very glad that I'd crossed the Afsluitdijk the previous evening. I cycled past a seemingly never-ending campsite in the dunes at a place called Sint Maartenszee and then onto a very exposed section of dyke, which was just about the last I encountered. From here on it was dunes. The dunes at least gave some shelter from the wind, but there was now a new menace - other cyclists. Suddenly there seemed to be hundreds of them - old, young, sporty types and grandparents on ebikes. Eventually I reached the port of IJmuiden, crossed the river on a free ferry an...

I slept well on the ferry. The North Sea was as calm as could be and there was a holiday atmosphere on deck as the sun went down. Leaving Hoek van Holland In the morning as we slid into the docks at Harwich it was a grey, drizzly Sunday morning. The whole of the Harwich old town was closed, but then, it was very early, so I had some breakfast in a seaside shelter and admired the run-down, crumbling seaside architecture while I waited for the Harwich harbour ferry to take me across to Felixstowe. Harwich Breakfast spot Luckily the pier had a nice little cafe beside it where a small group of travellers was waiting to cross, among them a Dutch couple who came regularly to Suffolk on their bikes to escape the overcrowded Dutch bike paths.  They loved the fact that in Suffolk you can cycle all day on the dense network of small country lanes and hardly see a car - or another cyclist.  After my own experience I had a lot of sympathy with them. Harwich harbour ...

I had reached King's Lynn at the end of July, where I had caught a train back to London, leaving the North Sea coast free for holidaymakers during the school holidays. It was the end of the first week in September when I started off again, catching the train back to King's Lynn and cycling off along the course of the old A17.  This is a trip I've made many times and I didn't feel the need to take the detours that the NSCR takes to avoid traffic.  I almost regretted this decision as the heavy lorries hurtled past me on the A17 between Saracen's Head and Fosdyke, but it was soon over and I was back among fields full of cabbages again.  I should say here that although I raced through this part of the journey it's well worth making a few stops to see some of the astonishing fenland churches, especially the one at Walpole St Peter. River Welland at Fosdyke Bridge Cabbages On the way to Boston I found another dyke, but this one was made getting on for 2000...

North of the Humber there are proper hills, but before I reached them I had to navigate my way out of the Humber Bridge car park and past the M62. The cycle paths are good around here, and well signposted, but they cross busy motorway slip roads and junctions so it's not much fun. In the Yorkshire Wolds My version of the route took me over the edge of the Yorkshire Wolds through Market Weighton and Pocklington, as I was going to visit friends in the village of Hovingham at the foot of the North York Moors. The route I took wasn't as long as the official one, but it went through proper hills and I was still regretting not seeing more of inland Norway when I was there. This was a fairly hilly day, and the next day was hillier still, as I headed straight through the moors towards Stokesley. It was also very rainy.  I got soaked early as I rode into Helmsley and I stopped to dry out in a cafe which was the most expensive of my entire trip. Helmsley is a jumping off point for ...