After a rather sleepless night (I had nightmares of forgetting things & loosing vital papers of money) I woke up farily brightly & had a large breakfast of eggs & sausages & toast & cereal.

Comapred to yesterday, or even objectivley, today has been one of the happiest & most beautiful days I've had! The axle was a ten minute job at the bike shop & I managed to leave Colchester (I didn't feel like looking around the Roman ruins at the time, but what I saw of the town looked very old) by 11 o'clock. I headced for Clacton-on-Sea along some of the flatest, windingest, most English roads I've ever imagined with a beautiful smell of newly cut grass and a blanket of mist over everything. NO RAIN!! I proceeded on the Walton-on-the-Naze, the scene of Arthur Ransome's "Secret Water" & saw that the Naze was much larger than I had imagined & the mud was red. I had my lunch on the promonade by the sea then headed for Harwich. I was hoping to cross by ferry to Felixstowe & get to Ipswich by evening, but the ferry didn't run on Saturdays, so I was stuck in Harwich for the night.