Jeeper Creepers

All good horror films start on a bright note. College teens packing to go on a “Super awesome road trip” to the woods/beach/mountains. They then venture off to the unknown where they are crammed in their SUV (Sport utility vehicle)/People carrier where they can immerse themselves in their own drinking, drug taking, hedonistic debauchery. As sure as night follows day they will get lost! Now, what follows can manifest itself in a number of ways, but generally it results the local nutter/monster/mutated hill folk picking them off one by one until the final two characters, whom are usually the best looking or elementally most famous are left. The final act is generally the plucky fight for survival where, somehow, two out-of-schoolers overpower and outwit the assailant and deliver the swift blow of justice. But..... on some occasions, this is not the case. Sometimes, just sometimes, they all die...........

 It was May bank holiday Sunday and three friends, whom were training for a cycling road trip to Paris from Cambridge had decided to meet up for another one of their rides around the local roads.  It being a three day weekend and having some spare time, it was ideal to try a new route or two and have a bit of an explore across the fenlands (You can see where this is going right?).

Myself and Matt set of from my house at about 8am to meet Oli en route as he lives the other side of the target destination. We met up about 9am and after about 10 minutes of conflabbing about the night before and the general man talk, we proceeded precisely 100 meters down the road to stop again for another 10 minutes, this time for Matt to stop and buy supplies from the local One-Stop. Without doubt it was the strangest fuel stop ever for a training ride. After an unfeasibly long time, in what is a relatively small village shop Matt emerged with three Bananas, a 4 pack of Snickers and a copy of that weeks Cambridge evening news.  He continued to kindly spread the Bananas to myself and oli and then began the arduous process of putting the paper in his Camelbak bag without creasing it. This proved to be a less than enviable task considering the bag also housed a 2.5kg disc weight that Matt was supplementing his ride with. The Snickers sat on top, just close enough to the outside of the bag to feel the full force of the forecast 25 degree bright sunshine and just low enough to feel the brunt of a dense metal disc. The ever optimistic Matt, assuring us that “They will be fine”........

Off we headed, the three amigos, into the heat haze. The next few hours were consumed with having fun in the sun on our bikes, setting the occasional section time on our Strava Apps on our phones (Click here forthe Ex-Strava-Ganza blog), and taking videos of us biking for the upcoming summer block buster film of the C2P trip.

All too early the time came when Oli announced “I have to go home, I need to do some stuff in the garden”, it is at this point we are reminded that we indeed are not pro cyclists and yes, we all have to return to the realities of life. So Oli, the local boy to the area split off to go home, but not before giving us fully comprehensive instructions of the way we should go home “go up there a bit, take a left at the fork and follow the road for a while”. What could go wrong?

It was all of five minutes before Matt and myself had taken the wrong “left” and ended up in the middle of a village, pointing the completely the wrong compass direction and having no idea where to go. As modern aged men, out came the Iphones and brought up Google maps. We knew we were in trouble as soon as the mapping of the local area on the phone couldn’t guide us to any major roadways. So we chose our minor roads route and set about backtracking a couple of miles and started again. 15 minutes down the road we thought we were heading in the right direction. I should point out that out in the fenlands the road signage is poor at best and you can continue for miles without the merest hint of where you actually are. With this in mind we thought it best to ask a local, I mean who knows the back fenland roads like a local. As you may or may not know, the fenland habitants can be a little “abstract” in certain areas, the sort of unstable, toothless chaps you find in one of those aforementioned films. But, as luck would have it we managed to come across a normal-ish looking man washing his car, albeit in a sleeveless vest and pretty short shorts.

“Excuse me, is this the way to Prickwillow?”

“Yes, just carry on down the road, it gets a little bumpy but you’ll be OK”.

And that’s when it all started.

At first it was all happy boys and their toys, but after a while we still hadn’t seen the golf course that we were aiming for on the phone map,  undeterred we carried on. The local chap couldn’t be wrong......

Another 10 minutes passed, and we came across “MildenhallRaceway”, a dirt track motorsport circuit for the likes of Banger racing and demolition derby’s, basically a dirt circle surrounded by rusty Pick-ups and transit vans, with hundreds of overweight middle ages guys wearing dungarees, steel toe cap boots and Hi-Vis vests. This was a location that I didn’t even know existed, and I have lived in the general area all my life. We carried on, the tinny roar of whatever rust buckets were circulating at the time started to fade into the distance behind us, and almost symbolically felt as though we were also leaving civilisation (sort of) behind.

As the infrastructure of the developed world became scarcer and scarcer around us, the road we were traversing became more and more in a state of disrepair. What was once a smooth-ish tarmac road had become a very bumpy tarmac road, and further on still became two strips of bumpy concrete that were just wide enough to be used by a car tyre.

The landscape had gone from green belt to beige overalls. We were now stumbling along a road that could only be described as an afterthought of an afterthought. Surrounded by vast fields of oli-seed, ageing farmyards and broken down machinery. There was however a light at the end of the tunnel. A row of trees, which according to our phones indicated the road that would take us back to humankind. But before we reached that there was a 200m stretch of mud/grass to traverse. tentatively we picked our route through potholes, rocks and sticks and out of the other side. I can safely say the Trek 1.5 or Orbea Aqua were not made with this terrain in mind. We had made the tree-line. From here it would be plane sailing! But as we approached the turning point of the trees, any hope we had evaporated into a haze of despair and dread. What faced us was a mile long road of crushed concrete and hardcore, flanked on either side by a bank of mud and crop fields, the road terminating at a farm. A farm not too dissimilar to that of the one from Jeepers Creepers.

We were now officially lost, we had come too far to turn back and must push on. Suddenly all of those horror films made sense. Why didn’t they just turn round and go back? why didn’t they go another way? Because they thought they knew better, just like us. But what waited for us ahead? A crazed psychopathic farmer, a chainsaw wielding maniac, mutant cannibals or indeed The Creeper. At this point the sun was beating down, and it was a question of what would finish us off first, exposure to the elements or all of the horrors out there. Heroically we pushed on.

For the next 15 minutes we rode a white knuckle ride of 5mph, gripping tightly to our bars, trying not to tumble off our bikes, if we were to come off here there would only be a world of pain, with lumps of hardcore and crushed concrete the makeup of our makeshift road. Adding to the danger, the occasional wedge of  razor sharp flint. Was this flint to render us immobile, allowing the assailants to pounce??? And what had become of Oli, it’s always the “Split-off guy” that meets his demise first. Was he now hanging from a barn rafter by his ankles?

                   

Unbelievably we made it to the end of the “road”. The constant praying for the tyres to remain puncture free had seemed to work. We were now faced with negotiating the farm, what would seem a typically easy task if it were not for the road block hay bales, Security trench and steel barrier to pass, it was as if they didn’t want us to pass through..... Luckily these had all been made to stop motor vehicles and our bikes were able to find a small toe path between them. Cautiously we made it across the deserted farmyard forecourt, with a distant digger the only movement around, was it digging a grave??? I looked around as we crossed the open yard and was relieved to see no Oli’s dangling from the barn rafters. Perhaps he had made it safely home, and was playing in his garden.

As we left the front gate of the farm we were again dismayed to find a gravel topped road, but at least this road ran parallel with the river. A river we knew would bring us to our eventual destination, the mythical land of “Prickwillow”. As we continued down the road, pinging gravel at each other with our tyres, there we signs of civilisation. A small cottage, some phone lines and a runner! A real person! We even stopped to ask him if we were on the right track. Sure enough he could form a fully structured sentence and seemed to be in control of all of his limbs and emotions. Things were looking up. We even managed to see a “Horde” of mountain bikers (I believe this is the correct term for this group). They may be slightly less evolved as people and more rudimentary with technology than road cyclists, but we took heart that we had reached an area where the technology of the wheel existed.

A short while, and a toilet stop later we found a road, a real road. One of tarmac and sign posts and cars!

Weak from thirst, and hunger. Savaged by the suns unforgiving rays. Surrounded by monsters and killers and spirits, we had survived. Against all the odds we were coming home to our family.

This was truly and undoubtedly  one of the greatest survival stories ever to be told.

Once I returned home I had a shower and went to a Birthday party!

The End

Thanks for Reading - James