Cycling day 55: Fakenham to East Harling
Today and tomorrow form my other major diversion from National Cycle Route 1 on the way back home to Canterbury. After a little portion of NCR1 out of Fakenham I soon met up with NCR13. Nearing Thetford Regional Cycle Route 30 also joins. Making good time I decided to follow this away from my planned route for a few miles in order to get it placed onto OpenCycleMap. I then retraced my steps to go into Thetford. The signing is slightly less clear for both NCR13 and RCR30, but there’s enough to work out the way; it’s mainly just that signs are poorly oriented to be visible on the approach to junctions (they’re fine for when you actually at the junction, but that’s too late for selecting your road position.). My plan was to follow RCR30 out of Thetford towards my accomodation this evening, but first I followed NCR13 some more through Thetford before retracing back to where RCR30 diverges from that. Unfortunately I forgot to put my camera batteries on charge last night, so I’ve had to note my Thetford detail via points-of-interest on my GPS. This means I haven’t managed to get road names here, seeing as many of them were longer than the 14 characters supported by my GPS, drawing a paper map would have been too much trouble this time. I’m sure that it won’t be too long until somebody else adds that level of detail.
Nearing Thetford the route uses a track which is also used by the Peddars Way long distance path. This skirts the edge of the Stanford military training area lined with notices every few metres warning the general public not to enter together with a long list of byelaws.
I’ve discovered something interesting (or at least I think it’s interesting) about the reference numbers for the postboxes in the Norwich (NR) area. All 14 of the postboxes I surveyed in this area repeated the digits from the outward portion of the code as the prefix for the latter portion of the code (e.g. NR16 1647). This is the only postal area that I’ve noticed this on, after having surveyed postboxes throughout the duration of this trip.