You’d be forgiven for thinking that cycle touring is always fun and easy and to be honest on the most part it’s a fine way to spend your time, but the longer you are doing it the higher your chances of having a bad day. There are a multitude of things that can spoil the …
Languages have never been my specialist subject. Somehow I managed to get a B at GCSE French and tried to brush up on some of what I learned at school with a French module during my degree but it seems to go in one ear and out l’autre. Not that French would help much on …
One of the great things about travelling by bike for a long period of time is that things are always slowly changing all around you. The most obvious things are the features of the landscape, from flatlands to hills to coasts to forests. But the changing of the seasons is a bit more subtle and …
So we are now entering the Baltic States, familiar (albeit with hazy memories) to many Brits as being the place for several stag do’s 10 or so years ago, drawn to the cheap beer and the promise of being able to shoot a machine gun in a KGB bunker. Hopefully there will be more to this …
In Finland just over 74% of the land area is covered in forest. There are over 50,000 lakes longer than 200m (but no-one has actually counted them all) and the Finns love to swim in them. The population is around 5 million and there are 2 million saunas, roughly 1 per household. So it seemed …
The standard response when anyone noticed our route took in Sweden was to adopt the international sign of being cold by wrapping both arms across the chest and making a brrrr sound. So when we stepped out of the train just outside Malmø we were ready to brace ourselves against the Arctic winds. But of …
30th August to 5th September 2014 Like Jenson Button, having the right tyres is critical for a touring cyclist and in Lubeck it was time for a pit stop. Although the Schwalbe Marathon Mondials that we’d fitted should be good for at least 10,000km and we’d only used them for a 1/10 of that they …
16th to 29th August 2014 All bike rides have to begin with a single pedal stroke and on 16th August we finally turned the cranks and rolled away from Roll For The Soul in Bristol to begin our trip. It was a fantastic send off with a peloton of purple and gold LVIS jerseys escorting …
I thought unemployment would mean lots of lounging on the sofa in a slanket eating pot noodles while watching Jeremy Kyle but the last 3 weeks have left barely any time for sitting around at all. The day after walking out of our respective offices we drove straight up to Glasgow so that I could …
e·ra /ˈɪərə, ˈɛrə/ [eer-uh, er-uh] noun 1. a period of time considered as being of a distinctive character; epoch 2. an extended period of time the years of which are numbered from a fixed point or event: the Christian era 3. a point in time, esp one beginning a new or distinctive period: the discovery …