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 The end of the day was a bit strange. At the moment, I have three phones and two SIM cards. I've been using the phones for different purposes each day, such as camera, GPS logger, radio and so on, but today is the first day in a while that I've actually had a phone turned on with a SIM card in it. It also happens to be the one day of this trip for which I've booked a hotel room in my name but using my mother's account, meaning that the hotel would have seen her phone number instead of mine. The hotel is a pub in a small hamlet near Honiton. I assumed that the bar would be open until normal pub closing time although I didn't hold out much hope of being able to get food after 8 pm on a Sunday. At about 19:50, I stopped on the way out of Honiton to put the lights on my bike and to check the directions for the last part of my journey. In doing that, I found that within the previous few minutes, I had missed a phone call from a number which turned out to be the hotel, and two calls and some texts from a mobile number which turned out to be my mother, who said the hotel had called her to ask what time I would be arriving. After figuring out what was going on, I tried to call the hotel twice but got their answering machine. The second time, I left a message in which I estimated that I would be there in about half an hour. In fact, the minr road from Honiton to Fenny Bridges has a lovely wide smooth shoulder and is slightly downhill so I reached the pub withing about 12 minutes, which was about how long I had just spent on the various phone calls. When I got here, the place was locked. There was a notice on the door giving the phone number which I had already tried, which went to an answering machine again, and a mobile number, which nobody answered. After a couple of minutes, the cleaner saw me and used her master key to let me into my room. That meant that like in Ashbourne, I was in my room but had no key and so couldn't really leave again. That wasn't really a problem though. In Ashbourne, I had wanted to go out to one of the adjacent restaurants. There's nowhere to eat around here so I'll just stay in my room finishing the sweets which I showed you yesterday. After a few minutes, the owner arrived, explaining that when she heard my meaasge saying that I was half an hour away, she had taken the chance to take the dogs out for a walk. She's given me my key now and we've arranged breakfast so it's all fine. The silly thing is that about an hour before the end of today's ride, I had to spend something like 15 minutes repairing a puncture. If it wasn't for that, I would have arrived at the hotel at about the time when the first phone call was being made, and a few minutes before it became dark enough that I needed lights. This was the fourth flat tyre of this trip. The first three were punctures on the inside edge of the tube, caused by what looks to me like a manufacturing defect. This one was a pair of holes on the outer side of the tyre. It's a pattern I've seen before and I think it's caused by hitting a stone at high speed. I haven't yet had any of what you would think of as the normal type of puncture, where a sharp object from the road penetrates the tyre. UTC Time: 20:42, Sunday 06 September 2015 Local Time: 21:42, Sunday 06 September 2015 Estimate of longitude: 3° 15' 45.76" W = -3.262710° Estimate of latitude: 50° 46' 41.92" N = 50.778310° Possible error on position estimate: 10 metres | |