July 18th - Eastbourne

Another week, another coast! And what a contrast. Loved the Dunwich ride, hated the Eastbourne one but it really shouldn't have been like that. Fact is, I was going to go to Eastbourne on the Friday by train for the Eastbourne Extreme festival, by Tanya suggested we get a group together to ride it instead. She'd skated there before and said it was a decent route so I agreed and several others (Christophe, Pam, Luke, Matt, Diego and Ed) decided to come along too.

However, arriving at Paddington with Pam and Christophe for the start, we found that Tanya was nowhere to be seen and wasn't answering her phone. Fortunately Ed had printed some maps but they were OS ones which I hate navigating from.

First stop was Battersea to pick up Simon so I didn't need a map for that bit, and having successfully met him, several people decided they needed a comfort break. While they took care of that, I bought a road atlas from a nearby garage and extracted to 2 pages that covered our route, binning the rest. It wasn't perfect but an improvement. My sense of direction once south of the river is shaky at best, but we made our way across Clapham Common and down through Streatham towards Croydon.

This was new territory for Pam whose previous furthest ride was 15 miles and Luke had only done one of about 40 over 5 years ago, so, combined with Simon whose bike was laden down with skates and luggage, our progress was only at a medium pace.

We also made a couple of wrong turns due to the poor maps and several times we had to wait while we called up Google maps on our phones to get us back on track.

We finally got ourselves back onto the B269 before Warlingham and the plan was to stay on that until we reached Chiddingstone Causeway where Alex would join us.

A nice, though slightly bumpy descent under the M25 saw me hit 46.5mph while I worried about my hat and sunglasses ability to remain attached to my head.

Unfortunately, before reaching Alex and somewhere around Limpsfield, we fell victim to the usual levels of inconsistent signage that this country seems to excel in. One signpost points the direction to a place and then the next junction fails to have any mention of it. As a result many stops were necessary with several Google checks before we regained the B269.

We finally reached Alex around midday and this lead to another issue. As Alex had been waiting for quite a while he was eager to get going, whereas Pam and several of the others were looking forward to a lunch stop and Christophe was having problems with his knee so decided to abandon and get the train back. In the end we compromised and agreed to ride to Penshurst and then eat there. It shouldn't have taken very long. We set off and took a right turn almost immediately which led to a nice downhill and then a reasonable climb. We stopped at the top of the climb to regroup which was just as well as Ed, Luke and Simon failed to appear. After about 10 minutes and fearing a mechanical, I rode back down the hill but they were nowhere to be seen. It took several attempts to contact them by phone and it turned out that they hadn't taken the right turn. It took a while to work out where they were and then how to get them back to us. We finally found them a route that would take them to Penshurst and I set off back up the hill to rejoin the others. I caught up with them in Penshurst at the pub where they were now having lunch.

Luke, Ed and Simon rolled in and Simon decided that he would call it a day at that point.

It was getting on for 2 by the time we set off again (I'd hoped to be in Eastbourne by then and we were still 35 miles short). The route had a lot of long, slow climbs which were pretty tough going and apart from a stretch where I hit 47.5mph on a downhill I was just wanting to get it over and done with.

For the final section of the ride, Alex took us to the start of something called the Cuckoo Trail. It's a Sustrans piece of work which used to be an old railway line and as he left us there he told us it was just a nice straight, slightly downhill route all the way to Eastbourne and it had been great when they had skated it. Well, on skates it might have been nice, but, with a surface that looked extremely conducive to giving punctures, several dog walkers and barriers to slow cyclists down every half a mile or so, it only took about a mile before Matt and I had had enough. The others continued on this route, Matt headed back to find a station and return to London and I made my way via some proper roads on to Eastbourne.

I finally arrived around 5pm to the welcome sight of Quaddie and a can of beer. Definitely not my best ride of the year, hopefully London to Cambridge this weekend will be better.