For most of the last few weeks, the weather has made life here at my woodland camp remarkably easy. Just the way I like it. Long, dry days. Warm evenings. Plenty of chances to sit outside in the evenings and just appreciate the lifestyle. It was easy to imagine that late summer might continue indefinitely, certainly up to the point I was due to head south. But over the last week, a change in the air has begun to take over the woods. I believe they call it autumn.
For much of the time I’ve been back in Kent, the county has lazily slumped from one heatwave to the next with only fractionally milder temperatures in-between. Rain was a thing of distant memory, well, as far back as Scotland earlier in the year anyway. Lawns and fields of wild grass had turned a lifeless brown/beige colour by mid-July and passing pleasantries between strangers seemed quickly to touch on the need for rain. A ‘good morning, nice weather, ay?’ remark in June soon became a ‘good morning, could do with a bit of rain, ay?’ remark in July. By late August everyone was doing their national duty, heavily complaining about the weather.
I’ve always thought it to be a quirky trait of us English that we are never really happy with the weather. It’s a bit of a national pastime. In winter we tend to complain endlessly about the cold and rain and lament the short days. In summers gone by, we would by and large be content and have to passively wait until winter to get back to berating the weather gods. Now, however, with our summers getting hotter and drier, we get to carry on moaning throughout the year by complaining to any and all who will listen that we’re too hot, constantly sweaty and for the need of rain. There isn’t, and has never been, at least in the eyes of the English, a perfect day where the weather is concerned.
For me, I actually didn’t mind the heat, although — cue the English in me — the nights did get a little unbearable at times in the tent. But I wasn’t in a rush for the rain to come or the temperatures to drop. I still wanted to wake up in the morning and roll out of the tent in just a pair of shorts and liked the fact the sleeping bag remained stuffed in its sack most nights, content with just lying on my mat. But all good things must come to an end. And this week it has begun to feel like they are.
The mornings have started to have a nip in the air and I’ve been reaching for the sleeping bag every night, even zipping it up around me. Colder temperatures are one thing but this week has also brought the return of the rains, and with them comes a whole set of little problems that the long summer had almost made me forget.
The Rain Arrives
Rain always makes life harder when you live outside. That in itself is not a revelation to me. I’ve spent enough years travelling by bike to know that rain is rarely welcome. A dry morning is simple. Wake up, pack away the sleeping bag and mat, take down the tent, load up the bike and I’m good to go. A wet morning is different.
The tent comes down soaked and weighs four times as much as it did yesterday. Undoubtedly, you rolled over in the night and pressed some part of the sleeping bag up against the tent and now that too has a distinct damp quality to it. Likewise your mat. Because when you wake up it’s still raining, you pack everything away wet and now transfer that dampness to everything else in the panniers. So you think to yourself, fine, breakfast will make me happier.
But no. You try to light the stove but your wet hands just ensure the lighter never flicks to life and you spend ten minutes trying to work out what piece of clothing you currently have on has remained dry enough to wipe your wet fingertips on to try again. Eventually the lighter sparks and the stove will come to life with the ferocity of a space rocket because you flooded it with fuel thinking that would, clearly, help the situation. And because you were huddled directly over it in an attempt to keep the rain off, the preceding fireball melts a large portion of your expensive rain jacket and singes off your eyebrows and for the next two hours or so all you can smell is burnt hair. At least though, for a second or two, your face was warm and dry.
Opening panniers, just briefly, ultimately means more water finds its way inside. You try to master the art of removing items from them without actually opening them wider than a few millimetres but fail. The wet hand you thrust through the opening in a desperate search for whatever you’re after only serves to transfer more rainwater to other, previously dry items. In the end you give up, fling open the bag and start removing pieces one by one, stuffing each under the jacket you’re wearing in a desperate bid to keep them dry, although most will inevitably fall to the ground, their combined weight no match for the waist drawcord, and now they are not only wet but muddy too. You drink your coffee and eat breakfast to the sound of raindrops hammering your hood and watch as they roll down to water your already runny-looking porridge and dilute your coffee. As I say, rain does make life harder.
Rain also has the extra unwelcome quality of destroying equipment. Prolonged submersion in water is one of the quickest ways to ruin your expensive tent. Leave it too long in that state and the dreaded black mould spots start appearing on the fabric. Clean clothes soon start to smell and down jackets and sleeping bags lose the ability to retain warmth but gain, to your dismay, around an extra 2 kg per square inch.
If you’re lucky, the rain stops sometime in the morning and the sun reappears and you get to dry everything out, usually over someone’s hedge or on the grass at a local park. If luck’s not on your side and the rain keeps falling, well then things only get harder. Days end in wet tents, wrapped in wet sleeping bags. Mornings start by climbing into wet clothes, feet into wet socks and shoes and fighting with the lighter again. In New Zealand, I once had eight days straight of rain and by day three didn’t own a single item that wasn’t at least damp; most were outright wet through. I don’t believe I have ever been so happy, on day nine, to see blue sky, before or since.
To be fair, the rain hasn’t been torrential but it has been rather persistent. Showers constantly come and go most evenings. In the day I’m not so fussed. My panniers keep dry things dry, so long as I don’t open them, and I spend most of my time lately in the library so I stay dry too. It’s when the rain comes at night.
Mornings have been damp on more than one occasion this week, forcing me to find time in the day to dry things out. My favourite spot at the moment is a corner of a local car park. The tarmac dries quickly once the sun returns and you get the benefit of the radiant heat helping things dry twice as fast. The most annoying aspect though has been looking at the forecast and knowing that it’ll only last a few hours. The next shower rolls in that night and I get to do it all over again the next day. I’d forgotten how fun this side of bike touring was.
Day By Day
As usual, I spent most of the week back in the library. There is not much more to say about that without repeating previous journals, which is probably a sign that I have now spent far too many hours there. The website still needs work but it’s now very close and I’m almost ready to share it with you all. There are still jobs to finish but the lists are finally getting shorter, not longer.
What felt different this week was everything outside the library. Each time I stepped back through the doors, autumn seemed to have advanced a little further. The evening light fades more quickly and it’s now all but dark by 7.30pm, meaning much more of my evenings are spent inside the tent. The down jacket has been coming back out whilst I cook dinner, having been stuffed at the bottom of one of the panniers for months now. It’s not quite gloves weather but some mornings I feel it’s not far off. And already the English is coming out in me and I think to myself, I miss the sun.
Africa may eventually bring heat and long days once more but before I reach any of that there is still Europe in autumn. Spain and Portugal are not guaranteed sunshine simply because they are further south. Mountains are still mountains. Rain is still rain. Cold mornings will still exist and whatever romantic image I have of riding south towards warmer weather, reality will almost certainly include days where everything is wet and I question why I thought bikepacking was a sensible idea in the first place.
The truth is it’s all part of the game. I may complain, I may long for the sun and moan to every passer-by that it’s all got a bit cold, but I actually like the fact we have the seasons in the UK. Autumn lets me know that it’s time to head south. And this week, the rains have reinforced the fact that my time back home is coming to an end.
In two weeks’ time I will leave my woodland camp here in the south-east of England and begin the 22,000 km cycle down to Cape Town. There’ll be wind and there’ll be rain and plenty of opportunities to make my fellow Englishmen proud with a good old moan about it all.
And I can’t wait.
