Day 3, Saturday 3 September

Stiffkey to Horsey

The day dawned reasonably fair and I cooked up some porridge on my camping stove but Mike eschewed my invitations to join in my breakfast. We rode down to Langham to pick up Sustrans route 30 and came across Langham Dome, a WW2 airfield and the site of a radar station. Here is a quote from their website, https://langhamdome.org/.

“RAF Langham was originally opened as a satellite station to nearby RAF Bircham Newton. Starting as just a grass strip to the north of the Langham to Cockthorpe road, it grew in size over the course of WW2. Some 20 or so different squadrons were ultimately stationed here at various times during the war.”

On we went arriving at Cromer around half past twelve (20 miles) where I think I remember buying sandwiches from a local supermarket and sitting on the car park wall to eat them. The day got steadily drearier as we approached Mundesley (30 miles) and by the time we arrived at Sea Palling (44 miles) it was tipping it down. We had ridden along a road called The Marrams just behind the dunes that was very sandy and the wet sand had been thrown up onto our bicycle chains that were now grinding horribly. Eventually we came to a car park and a tea room where we escaped the rain. We ordered a pot of hot tea and took off our sodden jackets and asked the nice lady if she knew any B&B’s nearby. We’d decided that pushing on another three miles to our campsite and pitching in the pouring rain was not a good idea. After quarter of an hour on her laptop computer (there were no other customers as it was so wet) she came up with a hotel that had a spare room: the Sutton Staithe Hotel at Sutton, four and a half miles away.

We thanked her profusely and set off towards Sutton following our sat-navs and arrived there 20 minutes later. We booked into a twin room, locked up our bikes round the back (unfortunately not under cover) and set about drying out, doing extra washing that you can’t do on a camp site, and went down to the restaurant for a very welcome evening meal. Mike ordered a Calzone that turned out to be more bread dough than filling and, despite being ravenously hungry, gave up after a few mouthfuls.