The Bikepacker: Bikepacking 2025 - Harwich to Banstead

Stats

Today's Route

1. To Harwich station:

2. From Liverpool Street station to London Bridge station

Forgot to start GPS watch recording!

3. From Sutton station to home:

The Complete Route

Travelogue

We woke up this morning to torrential rain. At least we weren't in a tent!

There'd been thunder and lightning in the night, so the rain wasn't exactly a surprise. What a welcome back to England!

We'd decided long ago that we'd use the train as much as possible to get home from Harwich and the weather just reinforced our sense that this was the right thing to do. The original thinking had been along the lines that cycling everywhere on the continent is pretty good (aside from Worms in Germany, that is!), and based on our experiences cycling to and from Portsmouth last year and down to Newhaven this year, cycling in England often sucks and occasionally feels downright dangerous. So, with two trains and a little cycling, we made our way home from Harwich.

We left our airbnb place at about 6:30 and cycled 5 km back to the port we'd arrived at yesterday. Right next door to it there's a railway station. And fortunately, it has working lifts so M1 didn't have to carry the bikes up stairs to get to the platform.

There's only room for six bikes in total on these trains and there were a few other cyclists already on the platform. It seemed though that none of them had googled the night before on how to know which carriage you could load your bike onto, like M1 and M2 had because we were the only people to recognise the one and only carriage for bikes as the train arrived and were the first on. There'd have been room anyway, but it's good to feel nice and smug about something every once in a while :-)

This first train took about 90 minutes to get us to London's Liverpool Street station. Once there, breakfast was the first priority. We'd had nothing but a few sips of water from our bottles since getting up at 6:00. So, we hit the Gails bakery at the station and had three croissants total and a coffee each. It was just like old times.

It was raining even harder than at Harwich now but we had no choice but to start cycling. London Bridge station is only a couple of km away, just to the south of the River Thames, so it wasn't too bad and our waterproofs did an OK job.

At London Bridge, we were fortunate to see that a train to our local station, Sutton was due to leave in only about 10 minutes. Great timing. M1 used his debit card at the barriers and gained access to the platform. M2 followed, tapped her card and..... DISASTER! She discovered that her card had expired a couple of weeks ago! M1 was on the platform. M2 was on the other side of the barriers. M1 was not able to use his card to pay for M2 as well.... the system does not allow this. The clock was ticking! The theme tune to Mission Impossible started to play somewhere. M2 turned her bike around and sprinted.... weirdly it looked like she was moving in slow motion and somehow this indicated she was moving really fast.... over to the ticket machines on the far side of the station. She worked her way through the labyrinth of on-screen choices and managed to buy a paper ticket! M1 signalled from afar that we had only three minutes left to get that train!

We made it. Phew! The Mission Impossible music stopped playing and may in fact have been imaginary all along. We're not sure as we both heard it. But mass hallucinations aside, our mission was accomplished and we were on the train to Sutton with our bikes and our bags.

At Sutton we were thrilled to discover that the lifts were out of service. M1 carried The Mule, bags still attached, all the way up the steps to the barrier. A kind employee carried M2's bike (despite us repeatedly asking him not to as we genuinely fear someone grabbing the wrong part of the bike and something breaking with all the weight). No disaster. We got the bikes up to street level.

From Sutton, it was a 5 km ride all the way home.

The washing machine is running full steam. The tent and camping gear will be cleaned and aired when we next have suitable weather. M2 has had her first cup of tea in six weeks.

We're home.

Photos