Then you hit a hill or the wind starts again and you have to fight for every inch of ground, but the feeling stays in the back of your mind and you realize that the whole trip is because of that feeling and if the feeling could remain, you could bike forever. The day didn’t start like that, or stay that way for very long, but it was very nice while it lasted.
The day actually dawned gray and stormy, with clouds from the sea rushing by us so fast that the sky seemed a never-ending swirl of angry motion. I had left shorts outside to dry and they were now wetter than before and we were forced to deal with a few days accumulation of laundry before we could set off.
The wind was so strong it threatened to take the tent with it as we packed everything away and only the two of us working together could get it stuffed into its sack and safely strapped to Heather’s bike. The local insects must have mourned its loss keenly.
By the time we left we discovered that this campsite had the best price of any we had yet visited, even bedhampton, no charge. We waited for the attendant to visit us, we even had our money ready, but no one paid the slightest attention to us at all. Not being ones to hunt down monetary loss we didn’t really complain, but if all municipal campgrounds charge the same rate we will be saving an enormous amount of our budget. Because of how clean the campgrounds washrooms were it was one of the few in the world that we actually felt a little guilty walking out of without paying.
We set out and found that a night’s sleep had not diminished the difficulty of the trip. The wind was, if anything, worse today and the hills seemed to grow in magnitude. By the time we hit a supermarket at noon we were ready to wait the two hours until it opened. We rested and read and were ready when it opened at 2:30.
Today we managed to make it to our destination, though we were strongly tempted by campgrounds along the way. We are learning to identify the changes in country not so much by changes in landscape, after all the area we are in looks strongly like southern Britain, but by changes in the species of road kill. At home it is gophers and coyotes, England it was foxes and badgers, here it is hedgehogs and bull frogs. Not the most pleasant way to experience a country but our eyes are always fixed on the road before us and car tires kill far more animals than you would expect when you are sitting secure in your sheltered metal box.
Halfway through the day the weather transformed itself completely. From gray and rainy to blue and sunny, so quickly it was almost impossible to believe it was the same day. Almost simultaneously we passed from La Hague into another area whose name I will admit to having forgotten. The change in terrain was as dramatic as the one in the weather. From endlessly hilly to amazingly flat. The trees on our right parted and there in dazzling glory was the ocean once more. I think this was the most spectacular and easy portion of biking for me the entire trip so far.
But as is the case in biking and in life we rounded a corner and the wind picked up again. We were now in terrain that was mostly marsh and very close to the shore so it was very flat, perfect for a bike. But it seems to me that that the closer to the ocean you are the more consistently windy it becomes, so we will have to decide if we want to head more inland and risk more hills or stay with the water and deal with the wind.
Our destination town of Denneville loomed up before us, at least the signs for it did. The actual town is a small coastal village with pitted roads and sandy soil. For the last kilometer before the turnoff that main road had passed through hundreds of fields growing carrots and leaks, so enticing that we wanted to sneak under the fences and pluck them fresh from the soil. The tiny little plots were enchanting and had been plowed in neat rows that reveal the soil underneath to be almost pure sand.
Denneville was deserted as we biked in, most of the houses boarded up for the winter. Not a soul greeted us as we biked through the central road and back around to the campground. Even the campground, which had a sign declaring it to be open, was deserted. The static mobile homes were boarded up, the hedges had ceased to be trimmed, even the lawn had that slightly overgrown length that said it hadn’t been mown for a while. The whole place had an air of desertion that declared the season to be closed and the town abandoned until further notice.
Here was again the fertile overgrowth of which H.P. Lovecraft wrote and it made the whole place hard on the nerves, as if the locals knew something we did not, that there were sinister forces behind the abandonment, a feeling only reinforced by the bats that flew out as the sun went down. Suddenly we were in a thousand clichéd vampire movies that seemed only too real to us. The worst was the toilet block, a great building, perhaps that largest in town, that stood at the centre of the campground. There should have been screaming kids, fussing young matrons, grumbling old men. Instead there was row upon row of empty toilet stalls creaking slightly with the wind, the only illumination twin shafts of sunlight coming through the roof and cutting pallid beams though slowly settling dust. Neither of us said anything. To speak would give substance to nameless fears, but we stayed close together all night.
Heather bravely, defiantly, washed the laundry only to curse herself when she realized that not enough light remained in the day for it to dry. We went for a walk down to the beach, a vast expanse of fine sand that disappeared north and south of us, our feelings of aloneness in the face of the alien growing even stronger at the sight of a tractor seemingly abandoned in the waves.
Our spirits lifted immeasurably when a boat appeared on the horizon and raced towards the tractor to be hauled out of the water, framed against a blazing red sunset the first proof that people still lived nearby. Not even the swarm of jumping sand flies that erupted beneath our feet as the sun disappeared could bring us down. We ran back to paved surfaces, our feet alternately squishing and crunching through the living carpet of the beach. By the time we got back it was already dark, our laundry was as damp as ever and when we crowded into our sleeping bags something kept clawing at our panniers outside. But it had been a good day.
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