Of Nightbusses, Car Ferries and English Trains
The Start of a Great Adventure
"Something feels wet in here"
Joel rummages through the small travel backpack. He fishes out a plastic cup of fruit and places it on the black railings in front of us, that are vibrating and swaying with the motion of the double-decker bus. He puts about a dozen pieces of melon, strawberry and grape back in the cup – they must have fallen out of their container during our speedy ride to the station.
Night Bus to Bruges
Great, now the whole backpack is sticky and our disinfectant wet wipes, which we had packed for such situations, are tucked away safely in the luggage compartment of the bus. The good news: the fruit is still clean and edible! Actually, not a lot could ruin our night now, because we’ve done it: We’ve quit our jobs, given away or sold all our belongings and are now heading towards … Istanbul! Well, technically we are headed towards England for Joel’s brother’s Stag-Do, but it’s basically en-route, right?!
After the handover of our flat the previous day, we got to stay with our friends Guiseppe and Kiki before departure. Shortly after 10 pm it’s time to leave for our night bus to Bruges. With some effort, we manage to squeeze one of our bike panniers in each of our 60l backpacks. We quickly realize that two panniers à 25l + 9l handlebar bag + tent + frame bags + 6ls of drinking bottles are too much. Perhaps we should have tried packing them before.
It is already dark by the time we start cycling with our giant backpacks from Nordend to Frankfurt bus station. It is a warm night and there is no wind. We pass orange-tinted streetlights and the city’s endlessly rising skyscrapers. A feeling of euphoria, finally we are off!
We arrive at the bus station fairly early and still have 20 minutes before departure. I read through the information on the Flixbus app again: the bus is due to arrive on time, an identity document is required for international border crossings. Identity documents… Where were they again? Hadn’t Joel asked me just this afternoon where he was supposed to put them? I ask him. He remembers our conversation, but he doesn’t remember what he did with them. There is only one thing to do: We start to scatter all our luggage around the bus station floor. The 20 or so bystanders, some with large suitcases, also waiting for a bus watch us with interest. “Maybe we left them on the kitchen counter in the apartment?” muses Joel. Not very helpful, thanks. Meanwhile, a few platforms away, our N84 night bus to Bruges pulls in. My hands start shaking as panic of missing the bus rises in me. “I’ve got them!”, Joel triumphantly holds up the case containing our IDs. They were stored in the bag I had packed.
Arriving at the bus completely out of breath, a staff member takes one look at our bikes and informs us that all bags are to be removed, including the bottle holders. When the bikes are then mounted naked to the bus, I understand why: The horizontal holder the bikes are being strapped to does not look particularly stable. We are the last passengers to get on the bus and of course, someone is sitting in the seats we had reserved. Joel kindly asks the person to move; however, this turns out to be a chain reaction and consequently leads to about 10 people having to change their seat.
I have a momentum of guilt, but it disappears immediately as we drop into the comfortable dark seats on the front row at the top of the double-decker bus. Adrenaline rushes through my veins and I can’t stop giggling as we are leaving Frankfurt in the dark, sweaty but happy.
“Next station: Bruges, this is the last stop,” buzzes from the bus intercom. We have almost arrived, half an hour earlier than expected. The bus journey had been surprisingly uneventful and we had even managed to catch some sleep (without Joel’s snoring, maybe even a little more…). Bikes and luggage survived the long journey unscathed – we start packing our bikes at the bus station, a large, deserted square of concrete. After a somewhat bedraggled man in his mid-50s agrees to take a picture of us, off we go!
Oh Belgium, How Flat Are Thou?
Within the first hundred metres, my bike wobbles so much that we have to stop several times and remount bags. Then we ride into the city centre of Bruges. It is chilly, but the sun is shining. At 9 am on a Sunday morning the otherwise so touristy city is completely empty. At the market square we see several horse-drawn carriages and coachmen waiting for customers. We stop at a small café, it is even warm enough to sit outside. The young waiter allows us to fill up our water bottles in the restrooms. When we leave, it is already 11 am and we still need to cycle about 67 km today.
When we think back to Belgium, we will never forget the great cycle paths. And the flatness of the land. And that everything looks the same after 15 km when you cycle along a canal. “How many kilometres have we cycled so far?”, asks Joel. “20”, I reply -” No way! We must have done a lot more by now!”, he exclaimes. We really are slower than we thought – with a slight headwind, an average speed of 14.4 km/h. But we’ve just never cycled with so much luggage before. Soon we notice that we have packed far too little food. Or rather, I notice it because Joel starts to get hangry (for those who don’t know: it’s a mixture of hungry and angry, i.e. when you start to get angry because you’re hungry).A bar of Lindt chocolate, which has seen better days, and some biscuits from our last holiday in France will have to do until lunch. In my defence: I wanted to take a whole bag of the food from our flat, Joel claimed, we didn’t have enough space.
As we’ve made a good third of the way, the sun starts to come out a bit – it’s time for lunch. We are very hungry but we only have a plastic bowl of pasta salad (rocket and red pesto) that Joel had bought the night before as a snack for the bus. You know – that stuff you get in the refrigerated counter that usually tastes really uninspiring. But what can I say – we were insanely hungry, so even this pasta salad was delicious!
Getting back on the bikes after lunch is not easy. But we still have a long way to go. We continue along Belgium’s picturesque cycle paths, through small villages, past tiny and bigger canals and finally even past a flock of sheep. Finally, we cross the border into France – only 10 kilometres to go. The cycle paths are significantly worse maintained here, but still passable. Once again we realise that we don’t really have any feeling for distances yet – the last 10 kilometres drag on like chewing gum. It is now almost 7 pm, we are hungry, our bottoms hurt and it is starting to get unpleasantly cold. I think I heard Joel mutter several times now that he will never get on a bike again after this trip.
Finally, we arrive (not for the last time) at the La Licorne campsite in Dunkerque. We are allocated a plot without electricity for €9.50. The campsite is very basic – there is no toilet paper, but as good German citizens we have some with us! In a fritterie we dine like kings for peanuts with huge amounts of chips, nuggets and two sandwiches + drinks for €11.50. We needed that. Outside it is slowly getting dark – and cold. We hurry back to the campsite, jump in the hot shower and then into our cozy sleeping bags. While I plan the route for the next day, I can already hear Joel’s soft snoring next to me.
Across the English Channel
We don’t get to rest for very long though. The next day we have to get up at 7 am, pack and go. It is another 20 kilomentres to go to the ferry docks and our ferry leaves at 12 pm. We buy bread, cheese and croissants, Joel also goes nuts and gets two espressos. It’s so strong that I can’t drink it at this hour of day. Joel happily drinks mine too. We ride through Dunkerque and even find a cycle path parallel to the main road. We pass groups of young men with shopping carts, to the right and left of the railway bridge we notice many colourful tents in plain sight. A camp, refugees on their way to England, with the hope of a better life ahead of them. As in Calais, a so-called Jungle, an illegal refugee camp, has developed in Dunkerque, from where people hope to sail over to England.
Eventually, the cycle path turns north towards the sea and we reach a larger access road to the harbour. It is very quiet, only the occasional truck overtakes us. Shortly before the coast, the road makes a bend, which we try to shorten via a small gravel path. I turn around, thinking I’ve seen a truck out of the corner of my eye, and briefly lose sight of the road ahead. Bad idea. My bike and I rattle through a deep pothole. Lucky me, I think, everything is still in one piece.
But I’m wrong. 50 metres later, my bike starts to make strange noises. I inspect my rear wheel. Flat. “I’ve got a puncture”, I say to Joel. He laughs at me and tells me off for not looking at the road. After a more or less seriously meant series of accusations, one thing is clear: we have to hurry the hell up if we want to make it to the ferry on time. It is now 11:15 am and we still have 2 kilometres to go. Annoyingly, we can already see the passport control building from here; the area is widely fenced off though and we have to ride (or walk) all the way around to get there. So we run/push like crazy and make it onto the ferry just in time.
We are the only passengers with bicycles as our sole vehicle. An employee in an orange high-vis vest directs us to the bicycle compartment: 5 bicycle racks painted with yellow boat paint at the rear of the ferry with blue rope dangling down from it. It is located directly next to the big lorries; the air is cold, wet and the engine noise of the ship and the trucks is earsplitting.
We lock and tie our bikes up and go on deck. Luckily we already know our way around this DFDS ferry – only a fortnight ago we came the exact same way by car. Now it’s time to find a power socket and charge all our electronic devices! After 18 kilometres of cycling and 2 kilometres of sprinting in the morning, I’m done with the world and sleep through most of the ferry ride. Joel wakes me up with a coffee and then we can already see the white cliffs of Dover shimmering through the misty air. We are in England!
We are being instructed by an announcement in English, French and Ukrainian (at least that’s what I think it is – Joel disagrees and thinks it was Polish) to go back to our vehicles. The ferry is docking front first so our bikes are now at the back of the ship. As the first lorries start moving, we push our bikes through the narrow corridor bordered by the huge tyres of the surrounding trucks. The engines turn on one by one and the noise is (again) tremendous. Arriving at the ramp at the front of the huge ferry, we are gestured to wait by yet another employee in a neon high-vis vest and work helmet by hand signals. Alternately, the trucks are allowed to pull out from the right and left of us, probably to keep the ship balanced. We are impressed by how well the workman coordinates the powerful vehicles with hand signals only. After all the lorries have left the ferry, we are the last to disembark.
Two Muppets and a Puncture
Due to the time difference, it is now only 1 pm, which plays into our hands – after all, we have about 38 miles to Faversham ahead of us – not to mention the flat tyre! The first one on this trip – I’ve never fixed a bicycle puncture before!
Fortunately, the dock crew in Dover is very friendly and we are allowed to fix the tyre in front of a small attendant’s hut. There even is a water tap, which is a big help in quickly identifying the darn hole. Even though we follow the instructions of our mending kit carefully, air continues to escape from the inner tube after it is back in the outer tyre. Perhaps it would have been wise to inflate the tube with proper pressure BEFORE reassembling everything. Well, in hindsight everything is easier. So I disassembled everything again, put in a replacement tube, inflate it, done. My first rear tyre change took just about 2 hours. (Comment from Joel: “It would have been much quicker if you had let me help, but you wanted to do everything yourself…”) – he’s probably right. But being able to change your own tyre is part of it, I think. Maybe I should mention that this was our only spare tyre…? No more punctures today please!
Do You Have to be so Hilly, Southern England!?
The road layout in Dover is a bit chaotic for cyclists. Also, the cycle paths are rather unkempt and we have to ride on the other side of the road – easier for Joel than for me. Lucky for me, all the crossings carry a reminder: Look left, look right, helps to avoid being run over by the next car. To navigate our way out of Dover, we have to keep looking at our phone the whole time, as we hardly stay on the same path for more than 100 yards (whether this was just the way Dover is built or due to a bug on our Komoot app is still not quite clear to us today…). After a short pitstop at ASDA (note to myself: Joel should not be allowed to go shopping hungry alone…), we continue uphill with 5 kg more luggage than before (that I have to carry!).
We have to make the 200 metres up from sea level to the cliffs! But at a 10% gradient I have to give in. We push – and that’s also hard with the load on our panniers – I have to stop and catch my breath at almost every road junction. It’s actually quite cold at around 10°C, but with all the sweating you don’t know whether you should put on another layer or take one off again. Finally we are at the top – or so we think.
We are on the National Cycle Route 16 to Canterbury, a fantastic network of roads with hardly any traffic, lush green fields with small well-tended hedges in between, trees and bushes in full bloom and the smell of freshly mown grass. England is really showing its most beautiful side today – if it weren’t for those damn hills! Don’t believe anyone who claims that England is flat. Without luggage (and recovered) the continuous ascents would hardly be a problem, but for us every hill soon becomes torture. My speedometer doesn’t show more than 4 mph. The 38 miles we thought we could easily manage drag on endlessly.
Hello Canterbury
It’s 7:15 pm. During a short break, Joel starts looking for a campsite closer to our current location. At the current pace it seems unlikely we will reach the Painter’s Farm in Faversham, the campsite we had booked (on a cherry orchard!) before 10 pm. A wise decision (as I will admit a few hours later). The first location we contact has space but no facilities apart from a chemical toilet, which doesn’t really serve our needs. Eventually we get a pitch in a caravan and motorhome park, which we reach shortly before closing time at 8 pm. We book for two nights right away as we are really exhausted. The warden allocates a nice spacious pitch sheltered by a couple of birch trees. We celebrate our Primus T-Multifuel cooker’s debut (at this point a huge thank you to my incredible colleagues!) and it works surprisingly well. We are feasting on sausages, tomatoes and a pre-packed chilli-sin-carne that we had brought over from Germany. It tastes delicious – and the main thing: it is hot food!!! We’re really hungry and are shoving everything in to the last scoop, then it’s bedtime. Did I mention that I love our sleeping bags?
It’s light outside. I wake up feeling warm and cosy. Even my feet are warm. Just my eyes feel a bit puffy. I guess I’m just still very tired.
Joel clambers out of the tent to make coffee. I stay in my cosy sleeping bag as long as I can, then I peek out. It’s still pretty chilly, but wrapped up in a sleeping bag it is already possible to sit comfortably outside on the camping chairs. We sit around, drink hot coffee with little blobs of powdered milk floating on the surface and enjoy doing nothing. Eventually I go to the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror for the first time that day – I am having a shocker: my eyes are almost completely swollen shut. Likely this has to do with the, now visible, 8 or more birch trees surrounding our tent, happily dropping pollen. “Urmm, why didn’t you tell me that my eyes are virtually swollen shut and make me look like a frog?”, I ask Joel disapprovingly. He looks at me innocently, “I thought you were just really tired!”.
We explore Canterbury. The small town, only a 10-minute walk from our campsite, has a wonderful old town centre with many, slightly leaning half-timbered houses and far too many restaurants with deliciously mouthwatering sounding dishes. We’ve just had lunch and after all – we are on a budget now! So quickly, get a move on!
In the end, we treat ourselves to coffee and two huge pieces of cake in a small tea-house. For dinner we have our first real camping stove-cooked meal: penne carbonara with real english bacon.
The End of the First Stretch
Soft dripping noises wake us. Little droplets are rolling down the outside of our camouflage-green tent. I remember why many people don’t like camping: packing up a tent in the rain really sucks. Everything gets wet and dirty. Luckily we’ll be able to hang everything up at Joel’s dad’s place tonight.
To make it in time for Elliot’s stag party, we have to take a train from Canterbury to Market Harborough today (through London). While on the train to London, operated by Southeastern Railways, there still is a reasonably decent bike compartment, on the train from London to Market Haborough (operated by a different company: East Midlands Railways) it becomes much more difficult: In the entire train there is only one narrow compartment designed for two bikes with a sliding door in the aisle directly behind the driver’s cabin.
Well, unless you have two racing bikes with no luggage, it is impossible. We manage to squeeze my bike into the compartment while Joel’s bike blocks the whole aisle, but oh well – we will only be on this train for 45 minutes and surely the driver won’t be going anywhere. We sit down for a moment and catch our breath, getting the bicycles on this incredibly narrow train was a challenge by itself. About 20 minutes before our stop, a train employee kindly informs us that our bikes are a safety risk and that we are to remove our luggage and fit the bikes in the compartment properly. We do as we are told and about 10 minutes later, the aisle is no longer blocked by Joel’s bike, but by our entire luggage and the back wheel of Joels bike – the architect of these compartments seems never to have tested the capacity for more than one bicycle.
We sit down for another 5 minutes, then start strapping the luggage back onto our bikes. (Note: despite all the difficulties with the transport of our bicycles on English trains, we don’t want to complain too much – bike transport is possible at certain times and even free of charge. We have also received assistance from staff members every time, so that we are very satisfied overall!)
It doesn’t just take a lot of time and energy to write a blog article, but also a stable internet connection. That is why our posts are usually delayed by a few weeks. Check out this map to see where we are right now or follow us on Instagram for daily updates!
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What a fabulous read Jana! Love your jaunty style packed with detail and humour. Looking forward to the next chapter.
Thank you so much Kerry! Glad you enjoyed reading it xx
What an amazing blog guys, loved reading every moment of it.
So proud of what you are doing (and dare I say a bit envious).
Love A & K
Aw cheers guys!!
Thank you for being our biggest fans xx
Cracking Jana, loving it
Cheers Aido xx
Innocents abroad! What a lively adventure; we will try not to worry about your safety too much!
No need to worry, we look out for each other. Speak soon, Joel & Jana