Sunday, August 20th 2017
Murder and manslaughter
Oxford, a city where Oscar Wilde, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis have studied. Where you cycle through narrow streets past wonderful historic university buildings and where I saw the largest collection of clarinets in my life in the Bates collection at the Faculty of Music.
And then there is Oxfordshire where we went from one idyllic village to the next while following the river Thames. Your typical English countryside.
We're glad though that we got through that area alive and well, because however picturesque or idyllic it all seems, Oxford and Oxfordshire are the background for many detectives like Sherlock Holmes, Morse, Lewis and Midsomer Murders. With two to three murders per episode, it can go only one of two ways: either it is very dangerous, or you meet nobody because everyone has been murdered - once or twice. Since the latter was not the case, it must have been very dangerous. I comforted myself with the thought that the murders tend to be domestic or within the family, although I kept a weary eye on Remy from that moment on.
London
We're in London since yesterday evening. The route toward London was very beautiful but not exactly easy. We had a lot of gravel paths and even though the sun was mostly there, we did get surprised by a couple of heavy downpours. When we entered the city through Kingston, we got thunder and hail even. In Richmond Park Remy got a flat tire. Cause was a sharp, small but nasty stone. Right at that moment we got another downpour, but we could take shelter under a tree.
Richmond Park is quite beautiful. It is a walled nature reserve or area of nearly ten square kilometers is the largest in Europe. Not a bad place for a puncture.
It was only around seven and after 90 kilometers when we cycled over the London Bridge. We we're tired, hungry and covered with mud.
Since London has no campsite, we're once again in a hotel (the decadence....) and once again our bicycles are in our room.
In the meantime we've discovered that London is a great city for cyclists, so we're going hop-on and hop-off our bicycles!
