Big roads vs little roads – the human perception of slopes – potholes
1. Big roads are boring but little roads always seem to be hard
Every so often we take a step back from the Epic Journey, and we muse that the problem with Epic Journeys is that you tend to whizz through places on the straightest road you can find and miss out all the engaging little detours that lurk just round the corner.
And because Sid and Doris do try to be Bonkers, as well as Epic, we do really have a duty to seek out some interesting things to communicate to our world-wide community of passionate blog-readers (hello Mum!!).
But there is a problem with little roads, and that is that not only are they very twiddly and take ages to get anywhere, but also they seem to have hidden unexpected climbs and awful surfaces (although that last bit applies to any road).
Then we get fed up with the little roads and hack on down the big ones again.
Rinse and repeat. Hopefully we will get better at the detours in France and Spain, once we become more confident of getting to the ferry in time.
2. Slopes
Slopes are doing my head in. Literally. The human brain does not really contain a spirit level which is why seasick people are recommended to look at the horizon, and why it is always surprising when you see the plane crew struggling to hard to push a trolley up the aisle shortly after takeoff.
There have been many times on this trip when we have been toiling up an apparently perfectly flat road and finding it extraordinarily hard going. We blame ourselves, the sun, the wind, the surface. But actually if we stop and look back we find we are actually going very steeply uphill and couldn’t see it.
The irritating thing about this is that it is also very very hard to photograph a slope and make it look properly, impressively, slope-y. I have put in a couple of recent pictures where we practically had to claw our way up on our hands and knees, and yet it looks flat flat flat in the pictures. Harumph.
3. Potholes
I’ve been meaning to write this one up for ages. We decided that potholes needed a grading system, and here it is. Many roads seem to be made up of layers, so level 1 goes down to the first layer below, level 2 to the second layer, level 3 through that with a rough pile of gravel at the bottom of the hole, and level 3+ is when plants are now growing in that pile of gravel.
We have seen some stupendous, Doris-eating-sized potholes but oddly enough when we see those our inclination is not to reach for the camera but rather to try and stay on the bikes. So here are some photos of disappointingly-small levels 1 and 2 potholes.
Anyway these were completely cast into the shade, as it were, by some fantastic sinkholes on the Italian coast road.
And I finish with a picture that is trying to show some impressive potholes on a steep slope.
