Day 1 - London to Wissant

Today was the official start to our ride, we woke up bright and early still jet lagged, after a fabulous night out with Nyree and Carlo watching some comedy at a festival in south bank.

Today was to be quite a big day, only 70k planned cycling but it involved 3 legs with a train and ferry in between each making logistics hard to plan.

 

London Town from south bank

 

Big Ben and little Ben

 

We woke to another beautiful day in London, and made our way into the city via some back roads on quiet Sunday morning roads. It was great riding down Whitehall road past all the monuments and arriving at charing cross station. We made good time and grabbed some breakfast for the hour and a half train journey to Canterbury.

 

Ready to roll, nice and sunny at 7am

Ready to roll, nice and sunny at 7am

 

Quick photo out the front of Westminster abbey

 

Rolling through the streets of London

 

Bikes on the train

 

The train was fairly straight forward except for a few route changes due to people seen walking on the tracks!? which didn't affect us but were quite confusing! We arrived in Canterbury and checked out the cathedral which was the official starting point to our journey on the via francienga. The cathedral was amazing, but we couldn't go right inside unfortunately due to Sunday mass, but we checked out the cloister and the external building.

Canterbury cathedral

 

Canterbury cathedral

 

The nerd shot, this marks the official beginning of our trip

 

Official stone for the via francienga

 

We were keen to get moving to make sure we made the ferry in time, and we easily found our way out of town and onto top the route.

Into the route proper

Into the route proper

Taking to bumpy walking track

 

 

The trail got a bit overgrown in places

 

The walking trails were very scenic but got progressively overgrown and difficult to ride as we got out of Canterbury, we pressed on for probably a little too far and started to make very slow progress. Eventually arriving in shepherdswell we joined back to the main bike path to Dover which we kept to for the rest of the way, luckily as we arrived in dover with only 30mins to spare for the ferry, not knowing that getting onto the ferry involved quite a few steps in getting the tickets and passport control.

 

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The ferry was great, much like any other ferry, and we took the chance to eat some lunch, and got in our fish and chips which was not too bad considering it was on the ferry. Chips and mushy peas have to be one of the best combinations that we never eat back in australia.

On the French Coast from Calais

Arriving in Calais we found the long weekend traffic and got stuck in the traffic jam, usually on a bike you can easily cut up the side but on fully loaded touring bikes it's not so easy! We got some euros in town but decided to get out of there ASAP as we would be taking the main road along to coast for 20k so getting out of there before the traffic starts going that way was a good idea.

The views were amazing the entire way, with rolling green hills along the coast line.

 

On the French Coast from Calais

On the French Coast from Calais

 

 

 

Arriving in Wissant we learnt it was super popular with french long weekenders and the town was packed, the place we hoped to stay couldn't store our bikes anywhere inside and could only suggest we lock them up on the street, which we were not happy with, most other places were booked out and it was getting quite late already, and we found another place which had room but it was there best room and the last one and they wanted an inflated price for the long weekend, we has no choice unless we kept going to the next town, it has great views at least, and we snuck the bikes into the room so nice and safe!
After a long day we didn't get into the hotel until around 8pm!
A quick walk around town and we found a huge queue for moules and frites which we couldn't resist! Washed down with a Belgium beer of course!

 

Dinner time!

Dinner time!

 

View from our hotel

 

http://www.strava.com/activities/151147163

All up it was a pretty successful day, some hard riding through the walking trails but some great scenery.

Tomorrow is a bit longer, but all riding. Rishi I suffering from jet lag still pretty bad and has only managed a few hours sleep each night, which is taking its toll. So hoping for a good solid nights sleep tonight!