(written by Dave)

We’ve had two restful days in the cottage, watching the rain and sun take turns outside.  It is great to be inside, rather than riding.  Yesterday I cleaned the bikes and fixed a few bits.  I managed to break my front mudguard/fender on the ride back from Land’s End the other day, giving me one more part to make running repairs to.

Nancy got out of bike cleaning duties by spending most of the day working on our trip maps.  If you notice the top navigational banner on our site, you’ll see a maps tab.  Our maps have been created by the LWOP CIO, Donaleen.  She takes the SPOT message that we send every day we change locations and enters the details into google maps.  Anyone who has tried to draw a multipoint map with google maps will know how difficult it is to get a nice looking map but Donaleen has done a great job (thanks Donaleen!).  The google maps interface is very crude and it is hard to experiment on anything other than the “live” posted map.  For some reason on our maps, a few of the spot points ended up in the wrong place.  Nancy (showing more patience that I or Donaleen could ever muster) took on google maps and fixed these errors.  We are hoping that at least one reader looks at the European actual map or Nancy will soon be back to her bike cleaning duties.

As requested, I snapped a few photos of our cottage.  Unfortunately the photos also contain all of our clutter and are nowhere as nice as those used in the online advertisement.  If you want to see the nice profession photos, have a look here at the online advert.  We really have enjoyed the cottage.  It has Wi-Fi, SkyTV, lots of light and chairs with backs.  Our tent only gets a tick mark on the “lots of light” box.  The only issue that we have with the cottage is that it is 1 mile from town.  The 16% grade hill into town is easy.  The 1 mile 16% grade back home is not as much fun.  The later has somewhat curtailed our “nipping out to the pub” for proper English bitter tastings.

We will have to leave the cottage on Saturday and have finally come up with a plan of where we will go next.  Our original plan for Europe was to only be in the UK for a short period, then to nip back into France and continue south through Spain.  Doing JOGLE meant that we’ve spent more time in the UK and have decided to take a ferry to Spain, rather than France.  This gets us a little further south sooner, and hopefully to warmer weather and will let us take a bit more leisurely pace.  The ferry only sails on Sundays and goes from Plymouth to Santander, Spain.  Since we’ve already ridden our bikes from Plymouth to Newlyn, we have decided to hop the train to Plymouth, before catching ferry to Spain.  There is one hitch with this plan though – there is currently a strike with the ferry company and all boats this week Sunday to Friday have been cancelled.  We are hopeful that things will be sorted in time for our sailing on Sunday.  If not, we’ll have to come up with another plan.

We have roughly 40 days left on our Schengen visas for Europe.  The general idea is to cycle from Santander to Barcelona, probably not in a direct route, and hopefully with a bit of time to spend in Barcelona at the end of the ride.  We had tinkered with the idea of going to Morocco after Spain but are now planning to call time on the bicycle part of our trip after Spain.  We are both looking forward to a break from moving houses every night.  There is also the other minor issue of our bikes slowly running out of working parts.  We really don’t want to push our luck with them in the middle of a Moroccan desert.

So, at least for now, the plan after Spain is to fly to Oregon.  We’ll spend a couple of months with our families, sorting out new fancy bikes (from Co-motion we hope) and doing some maintenance on our cabin in the Oregon woods.  Sometime in January we’ll probably head back to Sydney and start the job search again.  Somehow we have to pay for those bikes and the next trip.

Speaking of the next trip, I wasted a little time today looking at information on the Pan-American Highway from Alaska to Ushuaia.  We need to have a big trip in order to justify the new bikes.  We’ll have to work a few years to pay for it but this is good news in that it will give me time to work on Nancy’s fear of bears before we jet off to Alaska [editor’s note- no commitment from me yet on entering bear territory.  It’s important to do more research to make sure we know all of the risks and to work on who can outsprint who when the bears start chasing us.].

As for the bitters…  We had an early dinner in hopes of taking on the hill and having a pint.  Right now it is pissing down rain and we aren’t going anywhere.  I’m afraid that bitter reports will have to start tomorrow.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.