I rode once with a Brazilian cab driver in San Francisco who, when I asked him if he missed home, told me he missed every place he’d ever been.
I’ve been wondering the last two days why, when given a new stretch of road, I find myself comparing it to more familiar places. We’ve had some wooded hilly sections where the tires sounded like riding in New Hampshire. We’ve had some flat dry sections between fields that could be Iowa – and I’ve twice now coasted behind a Goldfinch, Iowa’s state bird. And yesterday we even hit a dry sandy section with tall brush on both sides that could have been the un-touristy parts of the Bahamas.
Today we had houseboats, which make me think of Amsterdam. Fifteen kilometers in, we encountered a team headed upstream, and we stopped to watch as she powered their boat into the lock and he closed the gate.
The man mentioned the section was called Heartbreak Hill – a section requiring navigating locks every 200 meters or so. Most of our route followed the canal system all day, and we were pleasantly distracted from the rain by watching and chatting to people navigating the channels.
On a climb out of Red Bull (actual name) we passed a lovely English lady who told us she was just mentioning to her husband that we “looked quite slow for youngin’s,” so decided to abandon our Strava stats and celebrate our youth at Titanic Brewing, just off the cycle path and famous for a Plum Porter, where the team helped us pick out some nice pairings for our soggy picnic lunch and sent us off with some dry t-shirts.
Fortified and feeling slightly speedier, we enjoyed improving weather and slight declines, mostly also along the canals, to Stafford. Happy for a shorter day and to be dry for the evening – I hope every rainy day reminds me of this one.
The 1948 Tour 
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