Great Britain Bike Tour: Part 5 (Manchester to Tiny Horses)

August 12, 2023

A month on our bicycles, unsupported, spanning the entire isle of Great Britain. Three countries. Five major cities. Tens of thousands of feet of incline. 800ish miles. Literally millions of sheep.

If you missed the previous post, you can find Part 4 here.

In this post, we'll travel from Manchester, England to some tiny horses we met in Wales. We took a bit of a shortcut from Manchester to Wales, but all is fair in love and stroads.

Our next chapter begins in Manchester. We arrived here after a harrowing morning on the Rochdale Canal, where we only narrowly escaped the dastardly clutches of Canadian Geese (how do they get to the UK, anyway?). But, never fear: we quickly checked into our hotel room, ditched the bikes, and set to exploring Manchester.

Manchester was a fun time. I'm not really sure how to blog about walking around a major city, since things happen in much less time, mud, and sweat than they do in the countryside. So I'll be kind of lazy about it and just list a few of our favorite stops:

• Pelican Beer Bar had a nice chill atmosphere with a few too many Edison bulbs. Their excellent draft list brought us back a second time.
• North Star Piccadilly is a generic hip city coffee shop, but one that made an A+ sourdough waffle and a couple of great coffee drinks. A very welcome change from the parade of mediocre coffees we'd endured for the previous couple of days.
• The wine at KERB was nothing short of excellent. The olives were exactly the light, delicious snack we needed to recharge on our rest day. And the servers were some of the friendliest people we met the entire trip. I wish I could go back here without flying all the way to England!

A special shoutout to Black Sheep Coffee, who have apparently replaced their entire ordering experience (and the baristas who rang you up) with tablets. Super efficient, except for the fact that the (presumably understaffed) baristas have to make everyone's food and drink AND help people order on the tablets because the POS is, well, a POS. So do yourself a favor and, if you ever consider going to a Black Sheep Coffee... just don't.

Anyway, we wined and dined and pied our way around Manchester for a day. The next day, we got up bright and early to continue our bicycle journey. Unlike the brutally small elevators in Edinburgh and Glasgow, this one was large enough for both of the bikes (and both of us) to ride down at the same time.

Our ride into Manchester helped make a tough decision: we did not feel like bicycling out of Manchester. Riding into the city wasn't great. But crawling back out for a full day through dozens of miles of sprawling suburbs, fighting our way through stroads and parking lots to find a non-chain place for dinner, then scraping the bottom of the barrel to find a mediocre place to camp in one day's biking distance of the city? Not our cup of tea. And there was a very hilly section devoid of decent pubs and campsites immediately after that. So we made the judgment call to fast-forward to the best part of Wales with the help of a train.

The train journey was surprisingly good. Manchester Picadilly station was just a couple of blocks from our hotel room, and had plenty of space for the bikes while we waited for our train. The ride was less than 4 hours total, with just one transfer in Shrewsbury. Totally adequate facilities to park our bikes in the bike storage; I didn't even have to remove one of my panniers! The whole journey went smoothly, except for a couple weird interactions with characters aboard the train. But that mostly just gave us something to laugh about afterward.

Unfortunately, the train reservation system in the UK is far from a perfect one, for a couple of reasons. For one, you have to call on the phone to make the reservation. There is no way to make the reservation at the same time as your book your ticket unless you book it all on the phone, a painful, lengthy and arduous process (when was the last time you read your credit card information out loud to someone?). But the bigger problem... is that nobody polices the bicycle storage section. Sometimes it's shared with handicap and large luggage storage. But there's one big problem: if you show up with a bike reservation, you have to put your bike somewhere. Immediately. And if anyone else decides to use the bike storage, whether or not they have a right to it, there's very little you can do about it, encumbered by a train and your luggage, with other passengers squeezing by you and mumbling obscenities under their breath at you.

Fortunately that wouldn't be a problem this time (stay tuned for more on that). We made it to Machynlleth (Mack-in-leth, roughly), Wales, at the correct time, all in one piece, without any mumbled obscenities. Then we hopped right on the bikes and headed over to lunch. And what a lunch! I can honestly say that I expected very little from Y Llew Coch - Mach (The Red Lion Machynlleth Town). Meg and I just wanted a pint and maybe a snack before we picked up supplies and headed over to our campsite. But the owner turned out to be super friendly and the food was absolutely fantastic. The best stir fry and katsu I've ever had in the UK.

From the Red Lion, we headed over to the local co-op for snacks, cheese, and other supplies, narrowly missing their insane 4PM Sunday closing time. We filled all available gaps in our bags with snacks, then took a very scenic road over to our campsite. Meg and I both appreciated seeing a golf course where the sheep pitch in to trim the grass.

We then rested and relaxed for the rest of the day at my absolute favorite campsite of the entire trip: Llwyn Lodgings. Beautiful views, only one other camper (who we had a great conversation with), and some of the nicest bathroom facilities of the entire journey. No marked campsites, with no access for vehicles, keeping out the loud partying camping crowd. Plenty of outlets to charge your phone and battery banks from. A spacious and clean sink to wash items in. A nice big gazebo to prep your food and relax in. I would very much like to return to try the local bakery's sourdough pizza, which they make on only the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays of the month. It's always satisfying to find such a nice place on a bike tour, but it's even better when it's better priced than most campsites! To make matters even better, we had blue skies and a very comfortable temperature for most of the day. It wasn't until the sun set that the rain started.

We woke up the next morning to find slugs. And water. And more slugs. And more water. Meg was not enthused. But I was feeling sprightly, so I packed up the tent and our sleeping gear, only barely convincing Meg to get out before I rolled the tent up.

The first 10 miles were brutally uphill. And the rain was absolutely pouring down on us. But the road was quiet, and the views were good, and our rain jackets held up perfectly. We looked like dorks, and we didn't go fast. But it was brilliant.

And before we knew it, we were over the mountain pass, heading downhill. We stopped to take pictures at a scenic spot, and saw our first bikepacker of the trip (probably doing the GB Divide Grand Depart, which started around the same time we did). As I've come to expect from the hardo bikepacker crowd, they didn't have time (or energy) to say hello, wave, or acknowledge us in any way. But that's OK, I prefer bicycle tourers anyway. On the bright side, the rain let up.

The day slipped by in a blur of cute tiny stone towns, rolling hills, giant trees, gianter hills, green, brief rain showers, and gorgeous mountain views. I kept taking my rain jacket on and off, oscillating between "too hot" and "that cloud looks awfully dark". We met a couple of groups of cycle tourers going the opposite direction, and stopped for a nice chat with both groups. I wished good luck to the group who planned on going all the way up to Bangor: they had a lot of steep riding through Snowdonia before they reached their destination. We stopped every once in a while for snacks to keep ourselves going; trailheads provided an abundant source of beautiful views, picnic tables, bathroom facilities, and informational placards to keep us entertained.

Before long, it was time for lunch. Or maybe brunch. We stopped at the Lost ARC in Rhayader for coffee and a Welsh rarebit. The bread and red onion marmalade jam were top tier. But I was disappointed to learn that the town of Rhayader has nothing to do with my favorite Camel album.

The pub in town seemed a good spot to scope out camping and dinner opportunities, so we took the hit and ordered a pint. Fueled up with coffee, beer, and food, we continued along to Builth Wells. We finally hit the "offroad" bits the other cycle tourers had warned us about. They turned out to be brilliant fun.

The landscape shifted from rocky mountains and grass to tall trees, enormous ferns, and raging rivers. And we started to see sheep with long, fluffy tails. We fought our way up a lot of uphill slopes, but were eventually rewarded with a speedy downhill ride into town.

And then it turned out that we did a crappy job of scoping out dinner and camping spots over a pint.

Dinner was disappointing. Almost every restaurant in town was closed, so we ended up eating at a pub that looked like the evil offspring of a central NY diner and an Applebee's. The beer was bad, the decor was tasteless, and the service was slow. But the bartender was friendly enough and, once our food arrived, it turned out to be slightly above average. We'll write it off as a win.

The camping situation was sneakier. We chose a combined camping and glamping facility a little bit out of town. We showed up, found our campsite, and things seemed awesome. There were other bicycle tourers there! They had a lot of cute fairy lights up around the campsites so you could get up and walk around at night without a torch. The common area had games, plugs to charge at, bathrooms with free showers, toilets with water, an air hocket table, a kitchen, and apparently a pool. They even sold a few goods from local merchants, including a very cute handmade frog made from local wool that I snuck into my bag as a Meg gift at a later date.

We set up our tent, charged our devices, showered, ate some dinner, had a beer, and socialised with a very nice family traveling around the country on holiday. It was lovely. Then the sun went down, we washed up, and returned to our campsite. I read my book a bit, and finally started to get sleepy. And then the loudest, most obnoxious group of campers crawled back from whatever hellhole they spawned from. They started a fire (loudly). They let their dogs run all over the campsite, including right up to the edge of our tent. They dug wine and liquor bottles out of their tents. And they generally kept anyone else in the tent camping area from sleeping at all for the next 4 or 5 hours.

As someone who doesn't enjoy confrontation, particularly with drunk people, I put passive noise cancelling headphones in and tried to sleep. I think I slept a little. But eventually around 1AM some hero came by and asked them to quiet down, so they went to the common area to socialise instead. I think I managed another 30 minutes of sleep before they returned at 3AM to annoy us some more.

Lesson learned: quiet hours are very, very, very important. And even more important? Enforcement of quiet hours.

Around 7AM we woke up from our crappy night of sleep. We packed up and politely escaped from conversation with the Impolites, who seemed unhealthily interested in our marital status. We headed down into town for a crappy gas station 'cappucino' and a couple of bap sandwiches. Then we rode along a very large road that was thankfully pretty empty for a few miles. Being on such a busy road, we discovered a valuable way to increase our speed on the bikes: fear. There were a lot of hedges that somebody really ought to trim on the sides of the road. The landscape filled with more and more trees. We stopped in a boring touristy town with a really awful ice cream shop, and ended up getting ice cream anyway because... well, where else were we going to go for ice cream?

The humidity rose. Our spirits fell. The hills kept on going. We were really tired. We climbed a ginormous hill that took forever because we had no energy left, even with the ice cream fueling us. Hope was dwindling. We couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel. And then we found tiny horses! And honestly, tiny horses kinda make everything alright.

Thanks for reading! Tune in next time to find out about our journey south to Cardiff and our escape from Wales back to England.

When I get around to posting it, you can find Part 6 here.