Corey and I survived our shared room surprisinglysurprisinlgy well!! But it was SOO hot in the room……it was difficult to get a lot of sleep anyway!Too hot
B, B and BBreakfast !! And it was a classic! A very full English! Nothing missing…and double portions of everything!
What a great pub this was. A real local…serving good beers…a real hub of the community sort of place…and abs out as far from a as a gastropub as you can get! So friendly! My sort of place!
After our breakfast…..we were overfull! And not feeling like biking at all! But it has to be done!
Actually….not a bad ride at all…..to Canterbury!
I had hoped to pop in to the cathedral for a quick visit! (Never been!) But twenty one pounds for a ten minute visit was just too excessive. (Should one really have to pay to visit a church?)…..this was what we missed!
Canterbury itself as busy as ever….full of tour groups…but a pretty place.
We rode through a couple of lovely villages thereafter…
……but overall it was not very pleasant riding.
UK drivers are certainly the worst we have come across on the whole trip..(indeed ALL my trips)…in terms of any respect – or care – for cyclists. We were regularly honked at, and sworn at, as if to say why the fuck are bicycles on my road. After the respect in Europe…it really was quite shocking.
And the few cycle lanes available were fairly unpleasant….
And the rubbish!! Again…the dirtiest place of the whole trip. All quite shocking and disappointing really!
And so to delightful Dartford!
And another Beer, Bed and Breakfast at the oddly named Royal Victoria and Bull Hotel.
A classic old coaching inn…..
After checking in we had a pint of Doom Bar here. I had a bit of a double-take when the price was 3 pounds 86p!
But they had no smoking area here…so we moved to the Flying Boat down the road. A pint of Ruddles: 1 pound 79! Doom Bar: 2.79!
Extraordinary really!!
And we were surrounded by a bunch of classic east London geezers…the focus of whom was Dave, who had evidently taken far too much advantage of the beer prices here! His stomach hung down over his chair…he was simply enormous!! He ordered a huge round…on his phone!! Far too difficult to actually get up to go to the bar. And he knew of a ground floor toilet around the corner…to avoid the two-storey climb to the toilets here! Corey and I just sat there…transfixed by the scene and the hilarious conversation!
The curry was good too! Corey’s first experience of the classic Chicken Tikka Masala!
Yup…it was a Wetherspoons! Filling up with bare-mid-riffed young women with enormous eyelashes, enormous nails….and – mostly – enormously flabby stomachs which might look better covered up!
Saturday night at spoons in Dartford!!
Delightful!!!
