Tag Archives: Alembon

Via Francigena, Tag 2/29: Von Alembon nach Bruay-la-Buissière

Noch nicht auf Deutsch verfugbar

Leider ist diese „post“ auf Deutsch nicht verfügbar. Meine Zeit ist sehr begrenzt und die Übersetzung, Erstellung und Veröffentlichung eines Beitrags dieser Art erfordert mehrere Stunden Arbeit.

Wenn Sie Englisch verstehen und bereit sind, mir zu helfen, um den Posten nach Deutsch zu übersetzen, wäre ich sehr dankbar. Ich verspreche es so schnell wie möglich, zu überprüfen und die Übersetzung zu veröffentlichen und seinen Namen als Übersetzer Kreditierung.

Sie können den Text auf Englisch kopieren und in Programmen wie Microsoft Word einzufügen, übersetzen und es zurück an die Adresse senden Paulo@EyeCycled.com

Danke.

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01/29. Via Francigena, Canterbury to Alembon [GPX File]

This GPS file represents the route I took between these two locations during my Via Francigena pilgrimage by bike from Canterbury, in the UK, to Rome, in Italy.

The route contains mistakes and tracks I may not recommend you to take, so it is important to read the respective posts for more context.

Use of this resource at your own risk.

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02/29. Via Francigena, Alemon to Bruay-de-Bissiere [GPX File]

This GPX file represents the route I took between these two locations during my Via Francigena pilgrimage by bike from Canterbury, in the UK, to Rome, in Italy.

The route contains mistakes and tracks I may not recommend you to take, so it is important to read the respective posts for more context.

Use of this resource at your own risk.

Please rate this post by clicking on the desired star (1 = Awful, 5 = Excellent)
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Via Francigena, Tag 1/29: Von Canterbury (UK) nach Alembon (Frankreich)

Noch nicht auf Deutsch verfugbar

Leider ist diese „post“ auf Deutsch nicht verfügbar. Meine Zeit ist sehr begrenzt und die Übersetzung, Erstellung und Veröffentlichung eines Beitrags dieser Art erfordert mehrere Stunden Arbeit.

Wenn Sie Englisch verstehen und bereit sind, mir zu helfen, um den Posten nach Deutsch zu übersetzen, wäre ich sehr dankbar. Ich verspreche es so schnell wie möglich, zu überprüfen und die Übersetzung zu veröffentlichen und seinen Namen als Übersetzer Kreditierung.

Sie können den Text auf Englisch kopieren und in Programmen wie Microsoft Word einzufügen, übersetzen und es zurück an die Adresse senden Paulo@EyeCycled.com

Danke.

Please rate this post by clicking on the desired star (1 = Awful, 5 = Excellent)
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Via Francigena, Day 2 (31 Jul), From Alembon to Bruay-la-Buissière

Expect the unexpected!

As suggested by my host in Alembon the day before, 8:00am I was downstairs for breakfast. Got to taste all the home made compote she does and home baked cake as well.

After breakfast I started packing. I confess, this is one of my weak points and something I definitely need to get better at. The Camino de Santiago has taught me a few lessons last year, which I seemed to have forgotten, but the Via Francigena is being quick at reminding me of them.

Before I left home I packed everything according to item type, e.g. clothes and footwear all in one pannier, electronics in another, 1st aid kit and items of personal hygiene in another and so on…

The thing is, when you are on the move and need something you don’t want to be opening several different panniers to get items you may need. The lesson I learned on the Camino was to pack a pannier with the most likely things you are going to need during the day (in the case of the Camino I packed it in a rucksack, as I had only 2 panniers then, where I now have 4), so you’ll only need to open one bag during the day, unless something out of the ordinary happens, which is not uncommon. I am, therefore, attempting to change the packing accordingly and moved several items around the panniers.

When I finished packing everything (took me about 25 min… yes, I am slow) brought everything downstairs, where the bike was, and started to load them in the bike. About 15 min later, when all panniers and the camping bag were loaded and fastened, I realised I was missing my Cateye cycling computer, which I thought I had placed in the handlebar bag together with the Garmin Edge 810. It wasn’t there. Went back to the room and searched everywhere as I knew I had it the day before… couldn’t find it. There was only one option left: Search in the panniers, which, as I mentioned before, were already loaded in the bike. I’ll give you one chance to guess if it was in the 1st pannier or in the last. Did you guess? Of course it was in the last. It must have fallen in the pannier as I was rearranging the packing. Altogether, I literally spend 1h looking for the damn thing. That meant I left the B&B only around 11:30am. For a pilgrim this is almost time of arrival, not time of departure. Anyway… need to give no excuses to anyone as I am alone, but it was a bit stressful. My own fault.

From Alembon I rode to Licques, where I managed to get a stamp from a water park there, as everything else was closed. Then to Tournehem-sur-la-Hem, where there was also nothing open. Not to say nothing, the church was open, but there was no one in it. From Tournehem my next destination was Thérouanne, where, according to my host the day before, there was a pilgrim’s hostel, but… everything was closed. I wasn’t planning to stay there anyway, as I wanted to ride more, so I rode further to Amettes where there is another hostel with special rates for pilgrims (€13/night). Guess what? Closed!

In all the villages I rode through everything was closed. Even the petrol stations were closed. if I wanted to setup camp somewhere I would have to go hungry as I couldn’t find anything open to buy food. I also couldn’t get any stamps on my Pilgrim’s credential which, upon arrival in Rome, is the document you have to show.

So I decided to continue riding to Bruay-la-Buissière as I knew it was a bigger town and there was bound to be something open. As I got there I asked several people about “auberges” or hotels but I couldn’t find any near, so I turned to Google which offered me a few, with one of the cheapest being the Ibis Style in the outskirts of town. Had to ride another 4 or 5 Km to get there and the daily rate wasn’t the €53 Google suggested, but €69 with Breakfast. By that point it was late and I was too tired to go searching for something cheaper, so that is where I stayed. The room was great and the hotel was near several restaurants. Had a really good meal at the 3 Les 3 Brasseurs.

When I left Alembon in the morning, the day was a bit unsettled and that made me forget to pass on the sunscreen on my skin. I live in the UK, so this is something we use very little there 🙂

The sunscreen was on the bottom of one of my panniers, which I really didn’t want to take off the bike again. The result was a really bad sun burn and fever at night which made for an uncomfortable night. I should have stopped to get the sunscreen… lesson number… ? (who’s counting anyway).

Well, that was it. I’m attaching a few pictures to this “post by email” which I hope will be self-explanatory. If you have any questions, just drop me a comment.

Before I close the post, have you made your donation to Mind UK, which is the charity I am sponsoring during this ride? Common, 20 quid will not be much at the end of the month and it’s all for a good cause.

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Via Francigena, day 1 (30/Jul): From Canterbury to Alembon

Greetings EyeCycled Friends,

Have you ever been a pilgrim?

Yes? Then skip to the next paragraph as I don’t need to preach to the choir.

No? OK, then 1-0-1 on being a pilgrim… expect the unexpected!

Every thing was going according to plan this morning. I woke up quite early (around 6:30am), even though I had the alarm set for 7:00am. After the “body necessities” and the shower, I was number 2 in line for breakfast which in the Canterbury Youth Hostel (YHA) starts being served at 7:30am.

All going according to plan so far.

After finishing my wonderful breakfast, I brought 3 of the 6 bags I am carrying downstairs and asked for the bike shed key. Most, if not all, YHAs have a bike shed, hence the reason I like staying with them.

Btw, let me do a little detour before I continue with the account of the morning… Met a German cyclist there, who is currently living in Paris. He told me he had to travel to New Castle for work and decided to bring his bicycle on the train with him and then go back to Paris by bike. He was staying in the same room as me and was heading to Newhaven to get the ferry to Dieppe, which I have also done already.

Back to my account of the morning… The key to the bike shed. Reception told me they had given the key to a lady hours before and she had not returned it. Now, where is this lady, you may ask? No one knows, of course. Eventually they found her, but that had introduced a 45 min delay in my schedule and I was late already because of the packing. Those that had traveled with me before, know I am slow on these things. Long story short, didn’t leave the YHA until 9:45am, when I wanted to be at the Cathedral by 9:00am.

Went to the Cathedral anyway, got my stamp, took pictures of me, the cathedral (inside and out), did a prayer asking for God to bless and protect me in this journey and by the time I started to ride it was almost 10:30am. Remember my post from a few weeks back in which I rode from Canterbury to Dover on the National Cycle Route 16? That took us almost 3h, but I didn’t have 3h until the ferry was due to depart.

So I took the decision to ride to Dover on the A2. I normally avoid busy roads or highways like this, but today shortness of time forced me to do it. The A2 is an almost straight line from Canterbury to Dover and very few hills. Would be a great ride if it wasn’t for the intense traffic, especially that of big articulated trucks going to the Dover docks and then into Europe. The Eastern European truck drivers are the worst of all. A truck from Romania drove literally a few inches by me, at a speed I would estimate at 70 miles/h (120 Km/h). The air dislocation almost brought me under the truck. Why do so many drivers have so little value for human life when they sit behind the steering wheel of their vehicles? Other people, especially cyclists, become just an obstacle, like road side debris which are worth the risk of hitting for the sake of saving their vehicles momentum and not having to slow down for a moment.

My thoughts while cycling to Dover were focused on how stupid the system we created is. The A2 is a very smooth and direct route that cyclists are encouraged not to use because of their it’s traffic (it’s not illegal to cycle in an A road, just in a motorway, as far as I know) so they become an exclusivity for the people protected by the metal frame of their cars, sitting down in their air conditioned cockpits, listening music in their in-car entertainment system. They are so self-absorbed in their own life and importance that they make a huge deal of having to slow down or ever take a different route that could potentially delay them just a few minutes, while the cyclists, as vulnerable as they are, not only to the road conditions be all weather as well, have to take poorly surfaced cycling lanes or minor roads full of potholes. Don’t tell me we are a civilized society, because that is NOT true. A society whose individuals are totally focused on wild consumption and the protection of exclusive use of resources paid by all. Why do we accept that cycling routes can be of any less quality than those cars use? Why those who choose to travel in low environmental impact styles are penalized by poor infrastructure. Shouldn’t they be rewarded for not damaging the environment? Makes me mad to be human…

Rant over!

Anyway, if you are cycling from Canterbury to Dover, don’t do what I did. Stick on the Cycle routes, they are longer, hilly, poorly paved, but safer…

Change of subject… Weather wasn’t good all day with some scattered light showers along the way, but some 5 Km before arriving in Dover, weather turned really nasty and started to rain quite heavily. I got completely soaked. As I arrived in the ferry terminal I was surprised to find a huge party of young cyclists in front of me, mostly teenagers. They appeared to be part of a scout group heading into Europe. There must have been at least 50 of them.

Also met a couple that was on a weekend cycling trip to Calais. The ferry was packed with passengers today. Lots of buses with Asian (Chinese?) tourists.

Once we disembarked I headed into Calais’ town centre following the signs, looked for the Tourist Information office and after I got a stamp in my pilgrim’s credentials (3 stamps already on the 1st day) I went to a shop to buy a French SIM card. At the tourist information office they highlighted a few places who, according to them, offered discount rates to Via Francigena pilgrims. Among them was this family run farm B&B in Alembon, which was a bit further than what I wanted to ride, but for some reason I was attracted to it. I was expecting to get here and just have a discount, but when I got here the only room the lady had available was her daughter’s who wasn’t here today. To my surprise when I asked how much the room was for the night, the lady said, “as much as you want to pay”. I said are 10 Euros OK? She answered “sure!”. Good to know there are still people not entirely driven by financial gain in this world, although I think she would only do that for pilgrims.

Not only I am sleeping in a comfortable bed tonight, but she has also fed me some very simple but wonderful food. She even asked me if I wanted beer or wine, but I declined. Just water today. A tomato salad wonderfully prepared, 3 different types of cheeses, ham, bread and butter. For desert I had, what I think was the best plum I ate in my entire life. There was a bowl full of them at the other end of a long table and I could smell them sitting from where I was.

They have a large, simple and unsophisticated, but wonderful fire place and on some tables at the wall she sells their home made compotes, which I would definitely buy, if I wasn’t riding a bicycle.

This is it for the day… almost 60 Km today not counting the time spent waiting to board the ferry and the channel crossing. I am really happy to have found this place in Alembon after a somewhat stressful start and all the heavy rain. Tomorrow is another day of full of the wonderful and unexpected I am sure. I also managed to hand-wash the clothes I was wearing today, so if they dry overnight, I might be able to wear the same clothes again, keeping the spare ones I brought clean in the panniers. If this repeats itself too often, I think I may have brought too much with me… time will tell.

If you read the entire text, I hope some of the pictures below are self-explanatory.

To finish today’s post, have you already made your contribution to Mind UK? You are reading this right? Common, open your wallet… it’s for a good cause.

God bless you all and thank you for your contribution.

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