Shaft of light just short of Orford in Suffolk (itself 30 miles short of our immediate destination today, the port of Harwich) almost illuminating one of the silliest routing decisions we’ve ever taken on a tandem tour, taking us through fields, grass and narrowest of footpath gates after narrrowest of gates round the Alde estuary.

Ride With GPS very clear that the best route (see map snapshot with the black arrows) was along the dotted lines just across the mouth of the river from Aldeburgh.

It wasn’t!

So what should have been 30 minutes became three hours, past cows and horses, through mud and gates, but ending with a wonderfully rustic hotel (not campsite, as planned) and gigantic pie-and-pint meal in Orford.

So, with thanks to Maeve Allison, a long-standing EMDR colleague, for our first, warm and restorative overnight in Beccles, we’re on our way.

Three months to Gdansk (Poland) and back, handing EMDR Focus over to (daughter) Katharine and Katie (Heath-Tilford), and embarking on our most ambitious tandem tour to date, even longer than the Tour Aotearoa the length of NZ in 2016.

Daisy2, our heavily-laden tandem (Daisy1 was our first, a siblings’ wedding gift in 1977), is going strong, especially also her new electrics, and so, largely, are her riders, Mark now aged 73 on the front and not far behind in all ways, Jutta as stoker on the back.

We’re on the ferry tonight (Wednesday 26 April ’23) from Harwich over to Hoek van Holland, thence tomorrow to Amsterdam and a couple of nights stay.

So hoping these posts might be of interest (there’ll be lots of photos, personal excitements and the occasional musings on climate change, EMDR and Life with a Large L), here’s the (still short) story so far.

They’re in a bit of a random order (spool through for the captions) and, Enjoy…