Saturday June 14, 2014

A lovely ride from Okehampton today.  We met an older Australian cyclist who was also getting frustrated trying to find his way out of Towns. He had a good map of Devon and still wasn’t sure which road to take.  We hopefully put him on the right road. We chatted about Australia and camping and how expensive we were finding England.  We didn’t get lost today, even though we were following B and C roads.  We had planned the route perfectly and followed it.  Ralf’s new Garmin (GPS) worked perfectly and for the first time in 7 months I kept my mouth shut and trusted the GPS!

It was a hilly ride but very scenic. Devon is well known for its thatched roof cottages.

The scenery was typically Devon countryside, rolling hills of farmland and pretty little villages with thatched roof cottages.  I am still amazed that on this small island there are 58 million people, but there is still an abundance of beautiful scenery and green space.

The churches in Devon have changed from the square stone built Norman churches.  A lot of the churches in Devon have steeples instead of towers.

We are staying with a warmshowers host in Tiverton tonight and of course he lived up a hill.  This host’s house was the worst one to get to to date, a steady climb out of Tiverton and then a right turn up an even steeper hill and then it kicked up again to finish.  I got of at the first right turn!

Tim and Jayne are really lovely people.  We had a good chat before dinner and Tim helped us plan our route.  We had a lovely chilli for dinner and then we sat down to update the blog and Tim and Jayne watched the world cup.  They were cheering for Costa Rica in the first game (they won) as they had lived in Costa Rica for 4 years.  The second game at 11:00 pm was England (they lost).  We were in bed way before that game started.