Just recived the following email from a guy in Adelaide. My comments to his various points are in red….
Hey Andrew,
My name is Ian Hendry and I’m from Adelaide, South Australia (yes, Tour Down Under territory). I have just been reading your Puglia 2010 blog after googling away looking for Eurovelo 5 info…seems we have a similar thing in mind. I am looking at London to Rome 2010. Your blog is very good, btw 🙂 I didn’t pay him to say this 🙂 – thanks Ian
I found your googlemaps plot along the A2 very useful as EV5 data is hard to come by in detail and the route out of London was a curious thing to me.
My goal is either June, July or August in 2010, so not far from your goal. I’m staying fairly flexible with dates as it’s dependant on work and rec leave etc.
As I’m from Australia, I was wondering what you know about the A2 road out of London. Is it a dedicated cycle way or a shoulder lane? Google Earth is a powerful tool, but I was wondering if you had cycled the London-Dover route before. Regarding the map on Google Maps, don’t take this as more than an indication of what the route might be. In the UK we have a fabulous signed cycle network – see the Sustrans website for more info about this. You can see that from London down to Dover (and the ferry) it is route 1. You can see that actually it goes all the way to Edinburgh if you fancy a challenge! The green bits of the route on the map are off road and you can see that a fair bit of route 1 from London to Dover is green. When it is on road, the national cycle network tends to be well segregated from the road itself, very often a shared path with pedestrians although this isn’t brilliant for picking up a bit of speed. I’m super pleased to see you have a similar goal and I wish you well with your planning. You seem to have done some cycling before. I’m doing more and more as time goes by – I sold my car a couple of years ago and have been on the bike ever since. Over here cycle networks are nonexistent but I prefer road riding over veloway. I cycle a little bit (25km round trip to work each day – I bit more than me: my commute is a 20 km round trip) and do a lot of running so I’m looking forward to the training to get my cycling endurance right up there. Me too: I have 370 days to get super fit and am up for the challenge!! Let me know what distance you hope to cover each day. I need to average about 80 kms a day I think but I need to do more planning on this… I can’t estimate a distance for myself just yet as I have to assess my endurance shortly to train up. Me too!
Great to see another rider planing to take on this ride…I really cant wait to get going, but accept there is some hard graft ahead. It’s fantastic to get emails like this: keep in touch!
Take it easy and I’ll keep reading your blog. Hope you don’t mind that you have become part of it. 🙂
Ian Hendry
Glenelg, Adelaide, South Australia.