Day One

Dieppe Ferry Terminal - last source of caffeine for three hours

Newhaven to Dieppe

This is an effort. The overnight ferry leaves Newhaven at 11pm or, occasionally, 00.30am and arrives four hours later. After the usual routine of settling down with a couple of hard earned Grolshs, this mere snippet of the space-time continuum allows for about an hour’s kip before ultra cool, 50’s New York jazz oozes out over the Tannoy an hour before arrival. At this time of year the sun reluctantly gets out of bed at about 7.45am, leaving three hours of night-riding.

Off peak train from London Victoria booked in advance £5.00 each. Ferry £28.00 at DFDS.

To Albert

The Avenue Verte was busy with several groups of well-lit cyclists setting off from the cyclepath's start in the car park at Arques-La-Bataille, a few miles inland from Dieppe along the D1. It was very cold and I would advise glovage and tightage and even some tootsies coverage too keep out the very damp chill. Not used to night riding in the pitch black, my flashing, Christmas cracker city-street lights that I packed were not up to the job. N had it covered with a humongous beam snitched from a North Sea lightship, probably, that you could see from the moon, probably. As we trundled through another sleepy, unstirred village a burst of trucks breached the silence as France began to wake.  

After an hour or so we left the Avenue Verte and took to the hills at Mesnieres-en-Bray. A lengthy incline was partly camouflaged by the dark and we reached the top in no time, ignorance-is-bliss style. Over the plateau, eerie car lights drifted silently across the blackness ahead of us until a hint of grey heralded dawn near Lucy. This is a magical time – blankets of mists lying over valleys through which a church might poke its spire; a weak orange wash over the lush green plays with perspective. Magical except that there was still no change in the numb-nuts département.

After a brief coffee stop in Vieux Rouen sur Bresle, we crossed from Seine Maritime into Somme over the river of the same name at Saint Savuer. The going had been hilly ups and downs from the Avenue Verte but now the creases in the topography smoothed out to gentle hills. There were plenty of very quiet backroads that dissected broad fields of maize and beet or those that had been freshly turned.

various pleasantries en route...

more freshly turned fields

dix-neuf up, dix-neuf down

Avoiding Amiens cost ten miles. But for its huge cathedral and ‘old’ quarter it is not a pleasant city. We entered the mid-afternoon graveyard shift where the energy saps, the eyelids get heavy and the miles just seem stretch and expand as if we were in some strange out of body experience. The scenery also seems to take the afternoon off too as it becomes washed out and duller. Thoughts wander. ‘Did I leave the gas on?’ But, as we neared Albert, the familiar white-trimmed, dark green signage of the British and Commonwealth War Grave Commission appeared. The cemeteries of WW1 popped randomly and more frequently the closer we got to the town.

Once in Albert, after 98 miles, N disrupted the routine that I had honed over several decades, probably, of control-freak pedantry; a routine hewn out of the tough rides over hill and down dale, Alp, bendy bit and such; after arriving in desolate bleakness with no more than a thimble full of liquid and a half-eaten Tracker bar; of bathing in water the colour of kerosene; of performing my toilette over a roughly dug hole. Yes, N disrupted the routine wrought from the tough rides of yesteryear: he suggested a pint. After huffing and puffing about trying to put up a tent when intoxicated, I was confronted by a rather nice Affligem and sat at a table in a rather pleasant afternoon sun to enjoy it.

After resuming the routine – including the usual pasta con coction – we enjoyed, if that was the word, the inns of Albert and more Affligem. Many British tour groups settle overnight in Albert during their battlefield tours. 

Albert got a pasting during WW1 - its crumbling church being an iconic image. That has been restored and its gold-plated dome glistens above the town square - which houses the subterranean Albert Museum – a poorer and less tecchy version of the equivalent in Ypres. It is full of all kinds of unusual bric-a-brac and the gruesome.