Absolutely wonderful day out with the boy yesterday. We set off about 9am (his idea of "early") and headed out through Canterbury. It was very much a case of making up the route as we went along - his repertoire is fairly limited so he wanted me to show him some nice roads to increase his local knowledge. Thought about going via Petham and over Kingsmill Down but opted for the route through Lower Hardres via Stelling Minnis to Lyminge. I fancied the nice long descent into Sandgate that features on the Fairies 300, but I couldn't quite remember the way so we ended up in Hythe instead.
From there, we basically followed NCN2 through Folkestone to Dover. On a beautiful sunny July day, it was glorious. The climb out of Folkestone is always a slog, especially in the heat, but there's no easy way to avoid it. We stayed on the NCN2 path as it went offroad from Capel, though I warned the boy it was likely to be rough in places... shows what I know! It has obviously been upgraded since the last time I rode it. It's all chipseal, though, so a fair bit of loose fine gravel in places, but as long as you moderate your speed it's safe enough, and mostly very pleasant to ride on. And the views are just marvellous.
I've never been able to find a satisfactory route through Dover. It is not a town whose roads have been designed with cyclists in mind, and the awful one-way system further complicates matters. I thought I'd try following the NCN2 signs and seeing where they took us... Heading into Dover, the 'safe' route is well signposted, so you avoid sharing the dual carriageway with lorries heading down to the docks. But then it all goes to pot, and the signs are either confusing or just plain missing. (To further confuse matters, NCN2 ends here and the coastal route becomes NCN1.) We ended up down by the Eastern Docks with NCN1 signs to Deal pointing basically straight up the cliff... It's a narrow path, shared with pedestrians, and with several flights of steps. Totally impossible to ride up even if the gradient weren't knee-bustingly steep. It's a real bugbear of mine when cycle routes are uncyclcable - they really shouldn't be allowed to designate them as cycle routes.
1Anyway, after getting off and pushing for a few hundred metres, we were back on the road, and it turned out we might have dodged a bullet because there was an insane queue of cars trying to get into the White Cliffs NT visitor centre at the top, which we would have had to negotiate if we'd stuck to the road route.
On the plus side, it meant the road along the cliffs to St Margarets was nice and empty. From there, we took the offroad route down to Kingsdown and along the coastal road through Walmer to Deal. With 80km done, we thought it was a good time to stop for sustenance, so treated ourselves to sausage sandwiches from the Sea Cafe, eaten sitting on the grass and soaking up the sunshine.
I gave the boy the option of taking the inland route home from Deal but he was keen to add some extra miles to the route, so we carried on across the golf course, through Sandwich, up to Minster and through Birchington to Minnis Bay, then the sea wall path to Reculver - with the merciful blessing of a favourable wind, although it was too busy to get up any speed.
At Reculver, we had a brief conflab about whether to head directly home or stop off at Goody Ales to take advantage of Kent's Biggest Beer Garden
TM. Bit of a no-brainer, really. And we got there just as they were cracking open a brand-new barrel of Good Knight, a seasonal hoppy bitter, which absolutely hit the spot and went down far too easily. So we had another. Could happily have had a third but could feel the first two already going to my head so decided against.
The final choice to be made was whether we took the road route home or the shortcut through the woods. On 25c tyres? Had to be the woods, of course. And it was a real blast.
Ended up with 127km in the bag. According to Strava, that is by some distance the longest ride I've done since 27 April 2019. And for the boy, it was his longest ride ever (by a matter of about 10km) - and he was absolutely full of it. He particularly enjoyed the fact that we saw three castles on the way (Dover, Deal and Walmer).
1 On interrogating a map when I got home, I worked out where we went wrong - there is in fact an alternative NCN1 on-road route through central Dover and up Castle Hill, which is what I was hoping to find (for anyone who is interested,
click here and select the option to show cycle routes). Just wish it had been better signposted! Though I do fear that in light of the news about
losing NCN routes that follow busy roads, the way up Castle Hill will be declassified.
