I thought this was meant to be the flat bit? And this was supposed to be quite an easy day. But nobody told the Severn valley these minor technical details.

I'd had a bad night's sleep, for no apparent reason, so when the alarm went off at 7.30 I chose to ignore it and slept on for another hour. I then cooked my breakfast, washed up and all that, as a result of which it was almost 11 when I left that dreary caravan site. The weather was so-so, with occasional drizzle and a ferocious headwind - so much for the prevailing Southwesterlies on the End to End!

Up as far as Worcester the going was good. It was national green transport week or similar, and Worcester traditionally makes a big thing of this. I saw several signs alluding to this fact. But that was about it - traffic was still horrendous! I decided that it was still too early for lunch, and pushed on. A couple out walking spotted me, and the woman started fumbling to get her camera out. I slowed down to make sure she had time to focus and stuff. Smile and wave, smile and wave…

Politics

This was the day of the Euro elections. I hadn't been organised enough to arrange a postal vote, and in the end I forgot to give my polling card to a friend to go and vote on my behalf (ie an informal proxy), so these were the first elections since I got the vote where I failed to use it. Shame on me.

There appeared to be an element of surprise when the Tories won the Euro elections in 1999. Why, I will never know. Didn't people have their feelers out? It was obvious to me from the outset that they'd do well, and the closer polling day came, the clearer it became to me. How come? Well, next time you want to predict an election result, get on your bike. All through my ride, I saw very few Liberal Democrat posters, despite riding through their heartland. I saw one solitary Labour one, in Worcester. And everywhere I went, I encountered Tory ones with their head-in-the-sand xenophobic crap. They were organised. they rallied their supporters. So they were bound to do well. Now I know I was riding mainly through rural areas, but the fact remains, I got it right. Forget opinion polls, and lube those chains, politicos!

A village post office was the perfect venue for my lunch break, a banana, Lucozade sport and some biscuits. Then onward to Bewdley. The terrain started getting more strenuous around these parts, and I was glad to arrive in charming Bewdley for a rest. I had a quick nostalgic look around the town and station (a group of us had descended on Andrea in the summer of 1994 and had a fantastic time round these parts). The Severn Valley Railway station had recently burned down, and was a bit of a mess. Mercury was a bit of an attention grabber in Bewdley, and several groups of people came over to talk to me. I wrote Andrea a card from Bewdley, but decided against delivering it to her parents' house on account of the large hill between Bewdley and Kidderminster. Instead, I made tracks for Bridgnorth.

Somebody should rename this part of the country North Cornwall! The road between Bewdley and Bridgnorth is just one never-ending series of sharp ups and downs. Come the roaring descent into Bridgnorth I was quite shattered. I then discovered that the campsite actually lay a couple of miles out the other side of town, by the Midlands Motor Museum. This entailed climbing a 1 in 7 hill on a major A road. Not the sort of experience I was looking for at this point in time. I got to the campsite, Stanmore Hall Camping Park, to find, to my horror, another Caravan Club site! AAAAaaaargh! The same annoying speed limit signs (duly ignored), signs saying "Everybody loves your dog…on a lead" and similar abominations. The site was actually quite pleasant, with a big pond in the middle, and ducks strolling around. This, of course, made me quite peckish, with a strange desire to have duck for dinner sometime soon. And when I saw the peacock strutting about…suffice it to say, I did attempt to lure it into my tent with biscuit crumbs! Not that I would have known how to cook a peacock on a camping stove!

Having pitched my tent I went back into Bridgnorth for dinner, and to explore the town. However, I took a very daft route to get there…the signposted one that led me up a great big long drag of a hill, a major wide ring road with cars screaming by at 60mph as I trundled up at one twelfth of that speed. Once at the top, the road then dipped sharply back into Bridgnorth centre. Totally superfluous waste of energy. Fine for cars to be sent that way, but not really ideal for cycling. Also, I destabilised Mercury by attaching one of my heavy locks to the rack, making the steering wobble precariously, so I had to find space in my seat bag instead. It's odd that something as light as a lock - only a couple of kilos or so, could cause the rack to swing so violently as to make handling unpredictable.

Bridgnorth was the most pleasant surprise of the trip thus far: I had always pictured Bridgnorth to be some grim, run-down industrial town; what I found was a very pleasant little town with a very pretty main street. Down below, in the valley, lies the pretty Northern terminus of the Severn Valley Railway. I found an agreeable little wine bar type place for food, and had pasta with chicken in some kind of chilli sauce. I then decamped to the Banks' pub next door for some local beer. The cricket world cup was on TV, with South Africa once again looking most impressive. Afterwards I went for a stroll around the town, getting some odd looks, not sure why, but it could have had something to do with the seat under my arm. That certainly drew odd looks when I entered pubs.

The views of the lower town from the walk ways in the upper town were most impressive, and the remains of the castle, burned by retreating royalists in 1646, were stunning in that they listed precariously. I discovered the funicular railway linking the lower and upper towns, and contemplated cheating the next day by using this as a means of avoiding riding up the hill again…I then entered one last pub before heading back to the campsite. Once again I forgot to tighten the front pin locking the seat to Mercury, and the seat popped out the moment I applied any pressure on the pedals. One day I'll remember to check these things before setting off…The return journey wasn't too bad. I made it up the big hill remarkably easily, though I could feel the beer sloshing around inside me as I powered on.