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Had a lay in till 7.45 today! Coffee with bread and butter for breakfast while I tried to map out todays journey. We fancied having a look round Chichester, it being a city neither of us had visited previously, so I found a campsite marked pretty near and decided to head for that. First though we cycled the few miles into Bognor Regis to look for a decent breakfast and found a good fry-up in ‘Heather’s Café’. Time was on our side so we took a sunny walk down the promenade before heading off toward Chichester. It was an easy ride with decent weather and we made it to ‘Lakeside Holiday Village’ just south of the city by 1pm. I asked the woman in reception for a pitch for the night and was a bit surprised when she refused. ‘Sorry, we’re booked up’ she claimed. ‘It’s the Festival of Speed and I’ve got two hundred bookings coming in today’. I pointed out that we were one small tent and no vehicle but she was adamant. I shrugged and walked out of the reception hut to tell Kez she’d have to get back on her bike. She took this news rather less calmly than I had.
‘What!?, there’s a huge empty field!’ she shouted.
‘I think she’s lying!’ She yelled, ‘She just doesn’t like the look of us!’ Slightly unreasonable I thought, surely we didn’t look that rough after five days on the road? At this point the reception woman emerged sheepishly from her guard hut, glanced at Kez’s very best face-of-thunder and asked how long we had wanted to stay.
‘One night’ I repeated and somehow this suddenly seemed to change her mind. ‘I’ll fit you in then, it should be ok’ she said. So we found ourself a nice flat pitch near some lovely big trees, set up the tent, dumped the panniers and rode off unladen for the short trip into Chichester.
A pleasant afternoon was had appreciating the Cathedral, appreciating some beer, and appreciating the abundance of free condiments in the obligatory Wetherspoons pub. It might be soulless in those places but at least you can pinch handfuls of pannier friendly sauce sachets as the staff try and work out what the grunting dole bludger chavs and dribbling OAPs are trying to order for their lunch.
We found a local produce market which was just closing up, but managed to get some beautiful local lamb chops and some fresh organic garlic, still attached to its long green leaves, and decided to head back to the camp site for dinner.
While perusing the OS map in the pub earlier I had noted a footpath that would take us into the campsite from the back, so I was quite pleased with myself when we found it easily. Kez was a bit sceptical, it was a bit bumpy, but it took us past a number of beautiful lakes, and we were both delighted and surprised to find a pair of swans with a huddle of little fluffy cygnets right on the edge of the path. Clearly the father swan didn’t like the look of us because he made a quick exit, but the mother seemed to be fairly unruffled by my photo snapping, just giving a gentle hiss when I moved a bit too close. A wonderful sight though, and one that made the whole day worth while.
We returned to our tent to find that the entire field had been taken up by tents, sporty cars, gazebos, motorbikes and crates of cheap lager. Presumably these were the festival of speed people. Throbbing engines stood idling noisily for no apparent reason, exhausts belched and barryboys lounged around on their daft looking motors. Our lovely lake side paddock had turned into some kind of Mad Max shanty town!
We settled down with our little meths stove, ignored the hubbub around us and cooked ourselves a wonderful meal of garlicky lamb chops, then decided to try the holiday village bar.
This turned out to be a rather grim venue full of rough cockney mobile home dwellers, and their kids playing arcade machines noisily so I necked a couple of dodgy John Smiths and we trudged back to the tent, for what was presumably going to be a noisy night of lager fuelled speed festival type partying. As it turned out, the weather turned to hell. The rain lashed, the wind roared, the parties petered out and our little tent kept us nicely snug.