I’m actually writing this from Germany. I’m going to try to write a post per country unless I end up having a number of stranger adventures in one place. The cruise ended up providing me with two posts, for example, neither one of them really being a normative sort of travel blog post or bicyclist blog kind of thing. From there I blew through England, France, and Belgium so fast that I’ve already visited two cities in Germany and gotten my German criminal background check and am heading to get it ready to present to the Jewish agency, but I still haven’t blogged the country after the cruise: The United Kingdom. That’s what I am going to do here. However, since the comprehensive format of the Gulf of America post has kept me from finishing it thus far, I am going to have to take a more abridged format for this post. This post is going to resemble the formatting of several of the posts from my “Trip around the World” tour of 2022 and 2023 where I simply make a few observations and then list out the Strava rides.
So before providing the Strava links, what do I have to say about the UK tour? Well, it was short, only a few days, and nearly perfect, if I might say so. I will say that I was solo for this trip, with only anecdotal conversations with people here and there at hostels and whatnot, and I was still feeling a little surreal from getting triggered on the last few days of the cruise and the technodemon flareup that had been plaguing me throughout. But when I say a little surreal, that’s pretty much what it was. I wasn’t feeling like I was going crazy or anything, like I have to admit I did for a few days in Athens toward the end of the3 “Trip around the World.” Just sort of in an observant and surreal mindset that often goes hand in hand with traveling all over by oneself.
That said, I think I can offer a pretty practical review of my days in the UK. When I started out, the country was quite cold, though not unbearably so, utterly and absolutely foggy, and there was rain for a day or two. However, by the time I got to Hastings the sun came out, and the remainder of the rides were uncharacteristically sunny for that time of year on the southern coast where I was riding.
Okay. I lied. I do just have to add one bizarre dimension to this post. So I am doing my best to attend an online Hebrew class. After riding in the rain and fog for the first few days, I found myself complaining to my Hebrew teacher about lack of energy from the other students about chatting or talking on WhatsApp. She told me you just have to accept how things go with each class group and give thing time to get moving and for people to get familiar with each other. I basically told her the yeah, yeah, I know how life goes, and gave her the excuse that I’m riding through England all by myself and it was foggy as hell, and was just feeling itchy for social interaction, and that I could use some sun. She did reinforce the sentiment saying, “yeah, you probably could use some sun.” It was precisely on that day that all the fog and rain stopped. It was still cold some days, but were it not for the low temperatures, I might have well been on a beach in Sicily. It was just that sunny the whole remainder of the trip. So just like on the cruise, when Mr. José nutjob and his crazy girlfriend triggering me resulted in huge storms punishing my enemies all around, so then was my need for sun heard from on high, and I got the sunniest Sussex Spring any traveler could have hoped for.
That, to me, was a big part of the perfection of this trip. See, if I had not ridden through some fog and some rain, well, I just wouldn’t have ridden through England. Now, for the rest of my life I’ll be able to say that I rode through English fog. Like, I’ll be in California riding on some foggy morning and some Cali rider will complain about the fog, and I’ll be able to say, “this ain’t nothing…I rode through SUSSEX FOG.” Like, riding through the fog was part of it. If I had ridden through England and there was nothing but sun, I just wouldn’t have gotten what the place was about.
HOWEVER…just when I was getting down about the foggy solitude and was whining about it to Shirley my Hebrew teacher, (my nickname for her is Shirlanu because Shirley in Hebrew means “my song” and Shirlanu means “our song”) the sun came out, so not only did I get the essence of a good English fog, but I also got Canterbury and Kent in pure sunny brilliance! Concerning the weather, then, things were almost too good to be true.
Concerning the rides and environs, I’ll have to say that I was absolutely floored. I credit the ambience of the place to the fact that the English Countryside was never invaded or destroyed in any modern war. In WWII London and some other urban centers were hit pretty hard at times, but not like on the continent, and these little towns on the coast haven’t been subject to the violence of war since the Middle Ages. So the houses and inns and farms looked truly ancient. Nothing was restored. This is really the way these folks live. Honestly I think I got the best impression of the United Kingdom I could have ever imagined.
In Canterbury I did have a bizarre conversation with Emma, a chick claiming to be possessed by Chloe, as well as an amazing conversation with an old guy named John whose life has been destroyed over the course of a couple of months in Brazil and who had been forced to come home to the UK after losing property, woman, money, everything. Otherwise, though talking to a couple of English farmers at a roadside Inn pretty much went exactly like you’d expect conversations with English farmers in roadside inns to go. It was completely stereotypical, like I was in a movie. I loved it.
Ultimately, if I am going to analyze any spiritual dimension of this trip, I’d say that there is a lesson: hard times in life (foggy rides) are a part of what we are meant to get out of life. Don’t sweat them. If you don’t get them, you’re missing the what you’re supposed to be learning. And from there I’ll say that the trip looked every bit like the Second Coming that I had hoped God would present me with as I head to Israel.
And with that, I am going to go ahead and list out the Strava rides. Take a look at the pictures and videos. They are positively brilliant.
It’s Always Sun While it Lasts
So no pictures or videos or detailed descriptions of much of anything with this particular post. Just general impressions. If you want to see the most incredibly gorgeous countryside there is, you’ll have to look at the Strava posts on this one.
Concerning the weird, spooky, and the general impressions, though, I did have one negative to report. On the cruise, at one of the stops, the British customs control agents came on board basically to look at our passports so we could pass into the country from the ship without difficulties. When the border agent looked at my passport he saw some old expired and voided out student visas to Israel. Since they had “VOID” written on them, he looked at me and said, “you didn’t uses these, I take it?” I said that I did use them, and he gave me an evil eye. I was not sure about that. There is an unfortunate reason those visas have void on them. When I decided not to go back to Israel to continue at the Ulpan in Netanya in 2019, the Ulpan told me they wouldn’t give me my money back unless the visas were voided. I think it was just a line they gave me to avoid giving me money back for the unused semester. But I don’t know why that agent looked at me suspiciously. If it had something to do with the void, or if he was an antisemite.
Also, in the hostels I saw on TV that Rachel Zegler, the actress who plays Snow White in the new movie, was doing a media tour of Britain and was everybody’s darling. Meanwhile I had been reading articles about Gal Gadot, my precious queen, being lambasted in the press. And finally, I ran into a fair bit of Trump hatred. Now the majority of my Synagogue in LA hates him too, but as committed Democrats they are going to have a certain vestment in opposing the President from the party in direct opposition to their own in their own country, so this sort of thing is expected. But Britain really shouldn’t have such a reason to be so hostile to Trump. He is, however, extraordinarily Zionist, if somewhat mercurial, if the press reports are to be believed.
At any rate, the customs agent, the Rachel Zegler love, and the Trump hate gave me a sense that there may just be a strong sentiment of antisemitism in the UK that I saw first hand after reading many articles about anti-Israel protests in the country. From the cruise post you’ll see that I really wasn’t dressing with any Jewish flavor. From the Florida post you’ll see that I am only wearing blue and white tzitzit on my backpack just a a nod to the Jewishness of this trip, and really for a bit of fun. Nobody knows what blue and white strings tied to a backpack are going to mean. So I had to ask myself what sort of reactions I would have gotten if I were wearing a kippah all the time. Even there, I only brought my Captain America kippah, for fun, to nod to my military background, US patriotism, and love of the superhero literary genre within my Jewish experience (Captain America was created by Jews). And my biggest tourist goal was to see the palace of a Christian archbishop while in the UK.
I really wasn’t getting heavy into the Jewishness of the journey, and I wonder what sort of reactions I would have gotten if I had been more overt with that expression. It was just a cause for pause, maybe some concern, that antisemitism in Britain is quite strong. However, when I was out and about, I was either by myself or generally having a good time with the locals. It’s was when my attention turned to abstract ideas and the media that I had cause for concern.
In the end, though, for me personally, with the people I met and the phenomenal countryside and architecture, my English rides were absolutely heavenly. And that’s what I got for this’d post, folks.
1 Comment