Albion, nice and a reasonable amount of pocket locations

Huge fan of the English Desert theme. I did a 200km back in Nov from Whitstable > Hythe > Broad Oak > Romney > Lydd > Hythe and home and felt the exact same as I rode through this area. A write up is gonna be in the next issue of Arriveé (I think) but here's the Romney Marsh / Lydd section - and my photo of that Coast Road junction!

'With no real climbing behind me I descended towards and then skirted around Hythe and onto the wide Romney salt marsh. I’ve always loved it here. The saturated plains are like a photographic negative of the high desert steppe on the edge of Idaho’s Lost River Range where I grew up. I don’t feel nostalgia – that’s a kind of falling backwards – but more like I enter a time loop where past geography circles around and overlays itself onto the present. The canals become straight highways, the sheep turn into rabbitbrush, and about 50 miles away Calais becomes one of the volcanic Menan Buttes offer up their roiling turmoil. Exposed to the big sky, I feel at home here.
[…]
But then at the Coast Drive T-junction on outskirts of Lydd-On-Sea the tailwind disappeared. I turned North and it was as if time stopped, or folded back on itself. Coast Drive at Lydd is set way back from the sea and the depth of the mojave coloured beach pushes the sea even farther from view and into a thin strip. Startled by the stillness – it seemed no-one was anywhere and the sea had turned grey - I started past bungalows that paved in the beach for the next 5 miles. Every home seemed about 1 ft tall and hiding from the sea or the beach or even the road. As I went past the tiny houses I looked through the front windows expecting to see dollhouse furniture but they revealed its inhabitants asleep, crinkly and sucked into their armchairs spaced way apart in cavernous, ballroom like sitting areas. It reminded of the book House of Leaves where a family moves into a large and creaky home only to discover that the house is impossibly larger the inside than the outside, full of dark chambers and unconnected but unending corridors. The book is dark and pretty unsettling but it’s is also a love story, although not the kind where the characters love for each other is allowed to occupy the same space or time.

I felt as old as the occupants, like I suddenly had a sparrow skeleton, and pedalled easy northwards up the Coast Road. The homes started getting taller, each roof rising a bit and I saw some younger people, or at least more elastic, finally moving about their houses and occasionally padding around gravel drives. The inside walls contracted and the outside walls expanded and the space of the homes back in sync - I breathed a little easier. The sea finally playing the hypotenuse by clawing away at the beach until the water nearly met me in town at the Grand Parade and the temporal interlude fiasco righted itself.'

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