There’s a stretch of A Road between us and Notso Bigtown. Not one of your nationally important, single digit A Roads – it doesn’t have any dual carriageway, for example, or even any Little Chefs. But it’s big enough: proper white lines, multi-lane roundabouts, crawler lanes, speed cameras, big lorries, snack vans and more lay-bys than you can shake a stick at. As of a few months ago – about the time we arrived – they had some major roadworks on that stretch, strained mightily & brought forth a gnat: a bike lane. Not much of a bike lane, admittedly. For a start it runs from one arbitrary point in the middle of nowhere to another not terribly far away arbitrary point in the middle of nowhere. For another start, it’s shared with any pedestrians there might happen to be, my least favourite sort of bike lane. And for a third start, it’s only on one side of the road so that any bikes actually using it westbound are forced to ride against the traffic – never fun in the hours of darkness, and dangerous if any cars want to turn across the lane, although at least the shortness of the bike lane means that at least is not going to happen. But hey, it’s a bike lane and even if it was only built because the powers that be had targets for putting in so many kms of bike lane and no targets for putting them anywhere actually useful, it’s the only bike lane that A road’s got if you don’t count the (I swear to God) nine-inch wide red-tarmacked extravaganza that runs through Papershop Village. Which I don’t
And that, my friends, is why it was an extremely bad place for twat tourist family to park their twat tourist car and get out their twat picnic table and start having a picnic. You’d think after passing about nineteen dozen of them, they’d have known what a lay-by looked like by now, and that the picture of the bike and it being a bit narrow might have tipped them off, but no. That’s holiday makers for you, I’m afraid. Leave your brains behind.
Looks like the tourist season is in full swing up here in the middle of nowhere. And I don’t think I’m going to like it one bit…
Aaaahhhhh. That’s the stuff. Thanks Mousey. I would hate to think that you had nothing to get disgruntled about now that you are living the rural dream.
Idiot car drivers reliably get my goat
You have a goat? Cool – you’re really taking this country living seriously, then.
From my experience even if the pedestrians have their own bit of pavement to walk on they’re going to walk on the cycle path because they’re idiots, but then in my view cyclists are idiots who don’t think that lights and pedestrian crossings apply to them and car drivers are idiots for all kinds of reasons, so maybe idiocy is transport agnostic?
That’ll be all humans then.
Why are random cycle lane targets not in miles as they should be?
Oh well, that’s probably the EU’s fault. Or something.
I’ve seen this film. City-girl kick-box assassin runs from her former handlers in the CIA and hides in a remote village dedicating herself to chainsaw sculpture. Then one day she is provoked by some rowdy redneck tourists who invade her rural sanctuary and picnic in teh bike line. She kickboxes them to death and hides the bodies … but a one line local newspaper report does not go unnoticed in CIA HQ and now the hunt is on to find her and persuade her to one last job …
Dammit, Moobs, I told you never to reveal I worked for the CIA…
[...] to when they packed it in for the day – a long delay indeed. Still, the only alternative was Big A-Road and its Bicycle Lane To Nowhere, so I pressed on, hoping there’d be room for a bike to pass at [...]