Since 2008 Iโve been blogging, Tweeting, Facebooking & Instagramming almost continuously. Iโm going to take a break to spend more time reading, watching & listening. There will be a couple of podcasts coming soon but otherwiseโฆ back on 1.1.22. ๐๐ดโโ๏ธ๐ช๐บ CyclingEurope.org/Contact
Iโve been taking a break from the website and social media but before I return in early 2022, hereโs a short video about a recent trip to Scotland. In late November 2021 I attended a Cycling UK event in Stirling, where I had been asked to give a talk about โCycling Europeโ. It was the perfect excuse to embark upon a wee bit of winter cycling โ from Stirling to Edinburgh along the northern bank of the Firth of Forth โ with a little time to explore the two cities at either end of the routeโฆ
October 2021 has been a quiet month on CyclingEurope.org; just two substantive posts, one about episode 40 of The Cycling Europe Podcast and the second reflecting upon the possibility of embarking upon a cycling trip around the Baltic Sea in 2022. Well, after quite some considerable thought and an in depth chat with a German chap called Bernd who cycled the complete route in 2019 (that will be published as an episode of The Cycling Europe Podcast later in November), I took a significant step in committing myself to heading off on a long Baltic cycle tour next week by buying a ticket for the ferry from Hull to Rotterdam on Monday 20th June 2022…
Anyone (well, almost anyone…) who has ever embarked upon a long cycle journey will recognise that there is a flaw in the process. It comes at the very end of your travels – perhaps even a few weeks or months after the end – when it dawns upon you that you no longer have a big cycling ‘thing’ towards which you can look forward. I replaced my doomed trip to Japan (scuppered by COVID) with a cycle around the UK in 2020 and, more recently, a trip to the Outer Hebrides in 2021. But I now find myself back at square one and I’ll be honest; I’ve been struggling to answer that all important question ‘where next?’
The cycle touring world is not short of people who enjoy sharing their two-wheeled adventures in books, on social media, on YouTube and even on podcasts such as this. But for every known cyclist, there are thousands of unknown cyclists embarking upon journeys that often surpass the endeavours of more publicity-friendly adventurers.ย This episode of the podcast meets two of them; Anne Lawther, who has had a 40-year relationship with long-distance cycling and, via the words of Laurence Warren, Colin Martin who, 50 years ago, set off on his Moulton to cycle the worldโฆ ย
