Portsmouth and le départ

It seems Chris's knees developed a problem due to the weight of his touring bike, so retiring was the right thing to do. He may join me later in the journey by plane.

When we tried to work out what needed to swap back and forth between bikes, there were only a handful of items that needed to transfer (as I most of the shared gear was on the trailer). It seems odd that I still need almost every thing now that its just me & Duck, but essentially everything is scaled to two people: bigger tent, bigger pots etc, so being as I can't shrink them I'm stuck with the extra weight.

Being the big, tough touring cyclists that we are... we spent much of the morning skulking in our tent away from the rain, and substantial sea winds. Even so, before we parted ways at the International Port, we did a fair amount of mucking about in Southsea and Portsmouth.

We visited the D-Day museum in Southsea and had a close look at their tank displays. As we rode along towards Portsmouth, the three-wheel bike articulated over speed bumps in a very satisfying way. The strong winds, and large windage of the touring bikes almost knocked me over a few times.

We saw the hovercraft to Ryde set off - passenger hovercraft service are a pretty rare thing. Sadly we were ejected from the historic dockyard, which was fun. They had apparently sussed our plan to short cut the ferry crossing by commandeering a ship of the fleet... or possibly they have a no bikes policy.Read more