When I was booking the B&B's a few months back, I saw Widnes with its river side location on the banks of the mersey and imagined a gleaming water front retreat.
Unfortunately I must have missed the entry in my guide book which quotes 'a vast ocean of ugliness, hopelessly, helplessly depressing, miles of dereliction'. Blimey.
Having weaved our way northwards along the welsh marshes earlier in the day, we got our first taste of the horrors to come as we made a buttock clenching dash across the queensway bridge in to widnes. Having braved the dual carriageway and rush hour traffic we found ourselves deposited in to what appeared to be an industrial wasteland, piles of scrap lay several stories high with the flags of st george flapping forlornly in the wind.
Rather worryingly, the gps showed us to be within six hundred meters of the hotel. As shaven headed youths with potatoes for faces shouted abuse at us from their vauxhall corsas we suddenly felt like aliens, our brightly coloured kit only serving to mark us out even more from our drab surrounds. Four hundred meters, we were still in the hell hole, two hundred meters we were getting closer...it was like that scene from Alien. Oh my god, its right on top of you!!!
And there it was, The hotel Mersey, our home for the night, undeniably and emphatically right in the middle of this mess. The spot was called the West Bank and it might as well have been the Gaza Strip for all the sense of unease that it instilled in us. We were greeted by a drunken punter who was shouting something unintelligible about us getting run over.
We took one look at each other and fled the west bank. We'd already done eighty miles and had no back up plan, but we wanted to be far, far away from this place and its intimidating inhabitants. There was talk of riding to the next town and trying our luck. In the end, we made it about two miles down the road where we found a travel lodge amidst a retail complex.
So here we are writing the team blog from our soulless but safe lodgings. Not quite what we had in mind when we started this great British bicycle adventure, but better days lie ahead...
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The day I had to ride through Warrington was the low point of my LEJOG. In a day or two the scenary will get much better. Good luck!
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