Kent Cycle Weekend

Following the resounding success of the Swedish cycle holiday, I decided to book a cycle and walking trip with Oak Hall holidays. This took place in Kent and the main base for the trip was the sprawling Otford Manor complex. There are many activities take place here through the year, such as Christian retreat weekends, seasonal parties and outdoor activities weekends at different times of the year. The Terrace Lounge offered a panoramic view across the local area.

The Oak Hall staff are made up of a small core of salaried staff and also a large number of volunteers, usually like students on a gap year. I received a warm welcome from the staff when I arrived and instantly felt at home. We gathered in the large dining room for a meal of baked potato with chilli and salad. Dave and I started to get to know the group at dinner and were sitting with 4 of the ladies who were on the walking tour. The small group consisted of two ladies who were Legal secretaries and two who were Librarians. The dominant personality in the group was very chatty and excitable. We exchanged stories about our holidays with Oakhall and explained that our friend Steve was ill and couldn’t come on the trip. This led to him being branded as “Lurgy Steve” by some of the ladies. Dave and I did intend to rebuke them for this disrespect to our fallen comrade but somehow decided that this did seem like a suitable nickname.

The dessert course of chocolate pudding proved to be more appetising than the main course. As is the custom on Oak Hall holidays, there was a quiz evening. Dave and I were quite bullish following our quiz success on the Swedish holiday. We were joined by several others in the group, including an older gentleman who was polite but a little hard of hearing. It is not the policy of this blog to identify people against their will, but as he had quite a rasping voice, we shall call him Zippy.

It was clear that Zippy was an enthusiastic team player who had a real talent for identifying answers to questions with 20:20 hindsight, usually about 10 seconds after someone had said the answer to our note taker. He also lacked the strategic nous needed in group quiz scenarios as team members would whisper or grab the answer paper and write something down to prevent competitors gaining an advantage, but this would be undone by Zippy who would blurt out whatever was written down.

We also had the inevitable Mr know it all in the team, someone with an overbearing certainty of their total righteousness in all things general knowledge. Unfortunately, this proved to be totally misplaced as he argued for the wrong answer on the year that the first test tube baby was born. Naturally, he was overruled him when he forcefully tried to tell us that Martina Navratilova won 11 Wimbledon singles titles instead of 9. The combination of intellectual ballast and gravitas brought to the table by Dave and your Clogger’s seemingly endless capacity for knowing a lot of useless facts proved to be irresistible, spurring on our team to victory and keeping up our 100% record in quizzes. Indeed, we were so good that we were right even when the quiz master said we were wrong as on guessing the longest book of the bible. The official answer was the Psalms but I had written down that the book of Jeremiah was the longest book as it had more words, which is indeed the right answer. This incident shows the need for the quiz equivalent of Hawkeye in tennis.

The evening ended with some free time in the main lounge which set the scene for Dave to produce his party trick of the card game. The game of choice was Dobble, where particpants have to do picture matching. After building up the event at dinner time, we had a gathering of several excited competitors. There are different variations of the game including some that involve trying accumulate as many cards as possible to others that involve trying to force your cards onto other competitors. As the evening wore on the games of Dobble seemed to become more violent than an Australian Rules football match.

Rather than staying at the Manor, I was lodging with my friend Dave, who lived a few miles away in the popular commuter town of Sevenoaks. The rather posh local community magazine noted that the town has an average house price of over £425K and 4.5% of the population are millionaires. This is mainly due to banking industry workers deciding that they want to escape to the country. The affluence of the town was evident with the presence of a Bentley and Lamborghini showroom near to the railway station.

The next morning we set out for the Manor, stopping off at the supermarket for Dave to purchase a cycle helmet since he had misplaced his normal one. He figured that he could just keep it in its packaging as a spare and hopefully borrow one from the cycle shed at Oak Hall. After finding a cycle helmet in the shed, the plan to return the new helmet for a refund was quickly jettisoned when the new girl in the group realised that she had forgotten her own head gear. Dave managed to remove the packaging more quickly than the Red Bull F1 pit crew doing a tyre change and assist the damsel in distress.

 As we left on our journey, I set out on a nice Specialised full suspension mountain bike but completed the journey on a more user friendly Cube mountain bike after a temporary problem with the gears on the first bike. In our group, there was a diverse range of characters including cycle bore. This particular individual can be found on many cycle trips and are easily identifiable as they will talk a good game by using professional cycling terminology and discuss the importance of locking on to the wheel of the person in front. There were a few references to The Tour as he clearly had an encyclopedic knowledge of the sport that began with Bradley Wiggins and ends with Chris Froome. There were moments when our cycle bore was caught out such as when he had to push his bike up some of a 20% gradient climb but it was made clear to everyone several times that this was because he couldn’t select the “granny gear”.

During the cycle, we learned that the new girl had cycled from London to Istanbul, transiting through countries like Romania, where she carried a stick to ward off wild dogs. It’s fair to say that she probably encountered more rabid dogs from among our group than in all of Transylvania. The group had a bit of a delay when our leader’s bike developed a chain link problem, forcing him to call back to base for assistance. He gave the satellite navigation system to Dave and he led us for the last 4 miles of the first leg of the journey.

We arrived at our rendezvous point which was the café at Trosley Country Park, where we discovered that one of the staff sounded very much like Miss Crabtree from South Park¸ when she became angry. After staying for around 45 minutes, it was time to set off back on a 21 mile trip to Otford Manor with our leader having now returned. The group halved in size on the return journey as other opted for a gentler cycle back, one of the dropouts notably being cycle bore. We set off from the country park, heading off down a small track then down the side of a flight of stairs before hitting speeds in excess of 30 mph on a steep downhill section. We were able to make good progress now that some of the slower members of the group had departed although the last three miles involved a steep climb up towards the Manor at the top of the valley.

 

Dave and I had the option of waiting around till dinner but decided to head back to the house to get refreshed and order some well-earned takeaway pizza. After our day out on the road, this hit the spot and didn’t touch the sides. After our nice dinner, we went back to the Manor just in time for dessert being served, so would’ve seemed rude not to join everyone for a piece of apple crumble. After the Saturday evening talk, our speaker, the fast talking and endlessly enthusiastic Paul, decided to do some impromptu market research to gauge the reaction of the group to the proposed idea of Oak Hall hosting a cycling, walking and camping weekend on the grounds of the Manor. Unfortunately, he was met with a tough crowd led by Zippy who rasped about some obscure camping incident from the distant past and someone else who had a friend of a friend who had to beat an adder to death with a mallet on a French cycle trip.

Saturday evening’s proceedings at the Manor ended with a large bonfire in one of the fields. Considering the raw ingredients of the spectacle were a few burning pallets, it attracted quite a crowd. Flames lapped up around 20 feet in the air at its peak and everyone had to stand a reasonable distance away though it was tempting to recreate the dancing in front of flame part of the Tales of the Unexpected opening credits.

 

Sunday morning began with a short church service at Otford Manor, followed by an activity time. We joined an orienteering course that had been specially set up for the group. We set off in groups of 2 to find 14 points around the grounds, each with a piece of card with a letter of the alphabet. Thankfully Dave proved to be the human GPS and helped us to find all but one of the checkpoints. It was a nice way to get some panoramic views of the garden of England and observe some curiosities like the giant toadstools in the fields.

 

 

 

When the results were announced, we were told that there were no particular losers from all those who went orienteering. This was true, there were no losers apart from every other group that went out apart from Dave and myself. We had a pleasant turkey roast at Sunday lunch followed by a slab of cheesecake. After saying our goodbyes to the group, we decided to toast the weekend with a nice glass of something strong. It so happened that there was some of the new 2013 vintage of Irn-Bru in the fridge, a truly thirst quenching and classy beverage before setting off for a quick afternoon excursion to the grounds of Knole House. It is fair to say that it was a fun-filled weekend that helped to highlight the delights of this beautiful part of England.

 

South West Revisited

Following our successful long weekend on the banks of the River Tamar earlier in the summer, it was time to come back to that idyllic part of the world for another visit. After leaving work late on Friday afternoon, it was a surprise to find that the usual rush hour delays on the M4 didn’t materialise. The last few miles of the journey take place on single track roads that are not so easy to negotiate. There was even a moment where a bat flew in very close proximity to the windscreen when the road was at its narrowest, just like in an eerie scene from a horror movie.

On arrival at our farm cottage, I was greeted with a lovely plate of curry which tasted all the better following the 220 mile journey. The group sat outside for a while with all the usual robust banter taking place though people did turn in earlier than usual feeling a bit tired after the journey and work, maybe it was a sign that the group isn’t as young any more.

The next morning we were greeted with a lovely cooked breakfast from our ever dependable hired help. There was heavy cloud cover for most of the weekend but it was still lovely to sit outside and take in the view, overlooking the River Tamar. We learned from Guy that he was in the local village and someone in a shop still made reference to the stag weekend from earlier in the summer. This event was quite loud and probably raised the eyebrows of a few locals who had their peace shattered. The key instigator in turning the volume up to 11 was Sunny, an individual who is more shouty than Kate Thornton in her X-Factor pomp. His absence was on the September weekend was due to work commitments, though one could speculate that it may have been driven by fear that it is Mississippi Burning down there and an army of disgruntled locals would be on the lookout for him.

It was decided that our Saturday afternoon activity would be visiting a Toboggan run on the outskirts of Plymouth at a sports centre that also included a dry ski slope. It was a problem on deciding who would drive but we all gathered in a circle and someone opened a “spin the bottle” app to decide on who would be chauffeur. Plymouth does have a reputation of being a rough and ready city, this is partly due to having been an important base for the Royal Navy. This publication does not wish to slander this proud city though it is clear that the trolls live on top of bridges rather than under them as in fairy tales.

The activity was reasonably priced with the option of one slide for £1.50 or five for the marginally cheaper price of £7. Everybody embraced this activity with childlike enthusiasm which was probably correct considering the other clientele did seem to be quite a bit younger than our group.

To access the track, we had to travel on a pulley system that took us up at least 200 metres to the start point. The first picture below shows the system in action, it is recommended that a gap of at least 20 metres is left between each individual.

 

The first couple of were a good opportunity to learn the track and braking points. I was kindly given three extra runs by one of the group though this selfless act may have been motivated by the need for cigarette.

Before the last run was due to happen, there was a bit of a sideshow in the queue as a young girl took a long time to decide if she wanted to participate in the tobogganing but after a few moments deliberation, she decided to try. Lee agreed with the staff that it would be a good idea to wait until she was at the top of the pulley system before setting off as she was likely to be slow. Inspite of this delay, I was feeling very bullish about a high speed run as delusions of tobogganing adequacy began to enter the mind along with dreams of a last minute place in Team GB for the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics.

As I approached one of the fastest parts of the track, I steadied the sled, cornering with all the precision of a Pendolino train as I approached maximum speed. Unfortunately, my dreams of standing next to Chemmy Alcott at the Opening Ceremony of the winter games was gone in a flash as I suddenly saw Lee on the other side of the corner with the terrified little girl immediately in front of him. Inspite of applying maximum brake, I smashed into the back of Lee with a big impact that tore the brake mechanism off of his sled.

This caused panic among the staff and the first aider was duly dispatched to check out any injuries. To their credit, the parents of the girl came over and were very apologetic, perhaps realising that they maybe should’ve discouraged her from going on the run. It was clear that his wrist was swollen and it was recommended to go to casualty, though this idea was met with a mocking laugh and the first aider was asked if casualty had a bar. Forms were filled and statements taken in order that the company could try and distance themselves from any blame. As it happened, the injury was not as bad as first feared and all everyone wanted was to just get on with things, though there would have been much less chance of an accident if they had a few strategically placed lights to warn of any incidents throughout the track. Unfortunately, the incident led to us being referred to as collision Colin and rear-ended Lee by certain merciless individuals in the gathering.

Later that afternoon I joined Guy and Luke on a shooting expedition on the grounds of the farm. This took us to the top fields where it is possible to have panoramic views of the Tamar.

 

 

 

Two of us would keep a lookout for potential kills and the other would have the responsibility of the gun. There was not many opportunities for a shot, though Guy aimed for a couple of birds but didn’t complete the kills. We were making our way back down towards the house when Luke spotted a rabbit within 40 feet of the gate. He then handed me the rifle, inviting me to try and take it out. Staring down the barrel of a shooter at a rabbit is probably the most inopportune moment to have the strains of Bright Eyes by Art Garfunkel come wafting through the mind.  I ended up pulling the gun too much to the right and the bunny was able to live to fight another day.

Guy and Luke did manage to make some kills in their early morning sorties to ensure that there was always something in the pot. Luke was able to shed his image of mid-management respectability by showing a great talent in skinning and cutting up with the sort of dexterity that would be expected of a butcher.

Saturday evening spent back at the farm where there was the usual robust banter. It is fair to say that the presence of Mr Magner and Mr Dufouleur had quite a bearing on the evening and perhaps caused some sore heads the next morning.

Sunday was a more relaxed day due to a mixture of some of the group having to depart early with work commitments and others who decided to take it more gently after the night before. On this relaxed day, it is nice to just sit on a seat in the paddock and watch the river go by.

 

 

It is often said that sequels are more disappointing than the original film but this particular trip should not be considered in the same light as Return to Oz. It was certainly quieter and more laid back than other lad’s weekends though was a nice opportunity to catch up with friends and have a few laughs in one of the most picturesque areas in the UK.