Follow Garry on his travels
On the “Little Pink Ferry.”
The ferry which crosses the river Hamble between Hamble-le-Rice and Warsash.
The crossing forms part of the national cycle route 2 which when it’s complete will run along the south coast of England, from Dover in Kent to St Austell in Cornwall.
I took it from Warsash to Hamble on my cycle ride down to the New Forest earlier this month.
Well that’s not been a very nice day for cycling, which is fine because I haven’t! I was wondering whether to stay on the island for one more night but after looking at the weather forecast for today which was for wind and rain and tomorrow looks even worse I decided to come home. I knew I couldn’t hang around too much today as the rain was forecast to come in at about 11 and I would have preferred to miss it if possible. It was a fairly swift ride across the island due to there being a strong tailwind and I got on the 9.30 ferry. On the trip across the water I could see the rain coming in and by the time we docked it had started to rain so that made my mind up to get the train home! I was literally 500 yards from home when the rain finally caught me! Spent the rest of the day at home just fiddling about, didn’t fancy seeing anybody or doing anything as it would have been my 30th wedding anniversary today and I just wanted to be on my own!
Damp start today there was a very heavy dew, so I had to pack the tent away wet, very wet! When I went to put it up tonight there must have been nearly a gallon of water in the bag! Needless to say the tent took a while to dry out, I knew it would so it gave me a good excuse to stop a bit earlier! My original plan today was to go back over the water, back to the north island as the locals call it! I went down to the ferry but there wasn’t a ferry in port, when I asked what time the next ferry was I got told 9 o’clock 45 minutes away, so rather than hang around I went back up the hill which leads to the ferry terminal just to have a look around and just kept going! Strangely I bumped into that nice man I met on the ferry yesterday as I was going up another hill! I decided that I was going to ride to Godshill on the other side of the island, apparently it’s meant to be a pretty village! Once again though I couldn’t see the attraction, but then I’m not a very good tourist! After that I decided to ride to Shanklin on the southeast of the island and found a nice cycle path that ran along the prom to Sandown about 4 miles away. After that I decided that I would stay on the island after all and started to make my way to Brighstone stopping off at the Chequers Inn at Rookley, which was always a favourite place to stop when we use to do the Isle of Wight trips. Staying at the usual campsite Grange Farm, but they seem to have even more camping pods and some funny little things called a camper hive which I can only liken to a wooden coffin that fits two people in but has a sliding door at the end, most bizarre! Photo; Wootton Creek.
It was a lovely sunny morning today so I decided it was too nice to stay at home so I’ve come to the Isle of Wight. I’ve had a very leisurely cycle today and I even had a tour around Portsmouth before I got the ferry over. Had a lovely chat with a man on the ferry he was a retired head master and he knew one of the people that inspired me to start cycling! Ann Mustoe who was also a teacher and when she retired she decided to cycle around the world totally unaided and on her own. I read a couple of her books years ago and as I said it inspired me to do long distance cycling. Sadly though she passed away a year or maybe two years ago. When I arrived on the island I decided that I wasn’t going to do my normal route across the island I was going to go somewhere different first. I’ve been coming to the island for donkeys years but I’ve never been to Cowes so I thought I’d give it a visit. Can’t say it was anything special it had a quant old high street and that was about it, there may have been more but I just done my normal thing of cycling through and not stopping, if it doesn’t appear on my route then I don’t see it! Just along the coast was Gurnard that was nice as the road there ran alongside the coast so there was some lovely views looking out over the Solent and watching all the boats. I was following the around the island cycle route but I soon got bored with that, it kept going up some really steep hills! I was going to go to my normal campsite at Brighstone but in the end I changed my mind and came back to near where the ferry goes from, I just fancied trying a different campsite.
