On 1st August 2007 I caught a train from Reading to London at 9.42am, wearing something white in celebration of it being Yorkshire Day. The sky was blue and the moon nearly full. I was going to Paris with a friend on the start of a round Europe […]
Isn’t it wonderful that, despite being competitors in the social networking world, WordPress, Twitter and Facebook all allow cross posting resulting in a spidery lattice of information to span the ether (they could call it the World Wide Web, no? It will never catch on…); there is no […]
Long-time followers of this blog will remember a period last summer when I seemed a little obsessed by tents. Clearly I needed to get out more at the time and the topic stopped when I decided that I would use hostels instead. It proved to be a wise […]
Michael Musto is a regular contributor to this blog via the “comments” buttons after each post. He has just commented upon my previous post about all things Alpine and I think his words deserve a promotion from the Championship that is the comments section to the Premiership of […]
Do you ever want to scream? Today is one of those days. I live in a flat where I pay a communal charge and it has just been increased by 500% from around £90 to just under £430. Now this is clearly an error but it annoys me […]
Apologies to everyone who is Welsh. “Hwyl” is not some alternative name for “Paul”. It means (control your laughter) “cheers” and so when Paul from Sanoodi emailed me last week, he was simply being friendly and not trying to confuse me with an alternative spelling of his first […]
I need to get back to blogging about cycling but I couldn’t resist pointing this out. Moving to WordPress has certainly drawn in the punters! 20,000 by the summer? Watch this (cyber)space. 🙂
This is a wonderful sight; my work email box is empty! It is not often like this but I have just eradicated my very last email (from the headteacher of all people). I fear that tomorrow there will be a deluge of messages as I return to school […]
Now, I pride myself on being a linguist but I’m struggling here. It’s a website forum that has kindly linked to this website. I’m guessing Turkish so let’s see if I can prove it….. It is! “Bisikletliler Derneği” translates rather prosaically to “Cyclist Association” See right for the proof. Visit their […]
Michael Musto, dragging himself away from the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, has contacted me with some questions about maps: Have you seen examples of the Michelin maps? Yes, I’ve bought the full set that I need to get from my home town all the way to Brindisi. The […]
With a name like Hewitt, Paul Hewitt Cycles could only be located in the north. And it is. In Leyland, Lancashire. It is recommended by Jim Rawnsley who happens to live in Cumbria so not too far away. That said, it does look like a very good shop. […]
He made it! Read Mark Beaumont’s valedictory message by clicking here.
Jim, my kind-of relation in Cumbria writes and adds to the bike and GPS tracking debates; Hello again Andrew Been a while since I last visited your site and you seem to have been very busy! Couple of things. The Ridgeback Panorama. I have had the model down […]
The Internet is sometimes a confusing thing. It’s not helped by the fact we all make it complicated by people like me signing up to a myriad of different ways of communicating. So when I send a message via a website (in this case http://www.sanoodi.com by filling in a form […]
I woke up this morning to find that someone from Ushuaia had visited the blog. This mythical place (the French even have an ecological television programme named after the town) is of course the destination of Mark Beaumont on his top to bottom trek of the Americas. The information above […]
It’s cool (which that word no longer is) when you get a Facebook friend request from the author of the book you are currently reading; introducing my new Facebook friend, Mr Bernie Friend! Thanks Bernie. If Bernie can do it, the rest of you can – just click on […]
George Jemmott adds some useful comments to the GPS tracking and mapping strand of thought; Re: sanoodi, I prefer bikely.com at the moment. It’s more bike-centric, and doesn’t have such a focus on GPS-enabled phone/computers (of which I don’t have one) …and then goes on to explain his […]
Reading is 1° west, 51° north. Brindisi is 18° east, 41° north. That is an easterly shift of 19° and a southerly shift of 10°. Pythagoras tells me that (assuming the Earth is flat, which it clearly isn’t unless you adhere to what these guys say – great quote: ““Deprogramming […]
My first rough attempt at a route for the Eurovelo 5 is now on my Sanoodi profile – click here to see it. I’d like to refine this is the months to come but the basic profile of my journey is here. Can you spot the Alps?
It appears that it is not possible to embed Sanoodi maps in WordPress. This is a real, real, real shame 🙁 Why? (Non-technical answers please – I have read the technical reasons on the Internet.)
I’ve been having an email conversation with Bernie Friend, writer of the book Cycling Back to Happiness. He certainly got there if this picture was taken after he finished his trip (I am on page 79 by the way). Here are the interesting bits. He is in blue, I’m in […]
Remember I asked George Jemmott (him of GPS fame) about the photo at the top of his new Eurovelo 5 website? Well here is the answer: It just so happens that the only picture I have of my bicycle and trailer together is there in front of that American […]
This is a truly amazing piece of software. It’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder how people occupied their time before the invention of the Internet, GPS, GPRS etc… Just what did people do? I have spent the last two hours delighting in having mapped my first […]
I’ve mentioned Sanoodi Mapping before – read the previous post here. I’ve just revisited the site, created my own page and produced the map and profile that you can see in the picture for my commute to work. It’s impressive stuff! Click here to visit the webpage itself. The profile […]
I went to WH Smith to see if the latest edition of The Bicycle Buyer had any reviews of touring bikes… but it didn’t. So when I got home I dug out a copy of the magazine that I had bought earlier in 2009 to see if they got […]
I haven’t made an error in the title. It is the final final piece of the map jigsaw. I wrote here about having bought the final map which covered the heel of Italy. I glossed over the fact that I was ignoring the journey from Reading to Dover by […]
I believe in competition; it gives people an opportunity to benchmark what they do and try and make improvements. It sometimes gets bad press when it encroaches on things like health care or education, but I am generally very supportive to the whole concept of the chase. It’s just […]
I have started reading everything here… but have yet to finish any of them. Let’s see how much I can get read while on holiday this week.
I first mentioned Silvia Nilsen (“Sil” to her friends!) in a post way back in April last year. She is a keen blogger and walker and she runs a whole host of mainly pilgrimage walking blogs including this one about her experiences of walking the Via Francigena (see the full […]
I mentioned in a post earlier today that, quite a few months ago, Mark Beaumont had been in touch and he had passed on some advice about tents. I remember telling him at the time that I had just finished reading his book about cycling around the world […]
This route almost takes in my daily commute to work from Reading to Henley. It launches on the 18th June 2010 and is described as follows: “This new 170 mile (274 km) circular route in the Chilterns, links attractions, market towns and places of interest. The route is on-road, […]
I wish the people who moan about the council not having invested in sufficient snow clearing equipment (see any newspaper letters page a few weeks ago) could see this. Some chump – you can ring them if you want – presumably bought some snow chains for their car […]
I honestly don’t write this blog for anyone apart from myself and to begin with that was fortunate as no-one else read it. However, as Google began to pick me up and as links began to appear elsewhere on the Internet directing people to this blog, I have […]
When I first posted this picture, the title was “Bad cycle storage design” but actually there is nothing wrong with the design. There is everything wrong with the placement of the bike sheds; at the back of a brand new prestigious development in Reading town centre (soon to be the […]
I sometimes wonder how many people have cycled in the past or are planning to cycle in the future from the UK to at least northern Italy. It doesn’t take long to find other blogs. Here is another: Oli Robbins, who cycled a fairly direct route from Essex to Venice […]
41/4 miles this morning with three short breaks….47 minutes worth of running. I’m not going to break any records here. Slight extension to my route – along the Thames from Reading Bridge to Caversham Bridge and back.
Abbey Wood Campsites Federation Road, London, London, SE2 0LS
Here it is; Cycling Day Date (w/e) From To Time Kms Cum. 1 18/7 Reading London 4h35 65 65 2 19/7 London Canterbury 6h41 94 159 3 20/7 Canterbury Dover 1h54 27 186 3 20/7 Calais Saint Omer 3h08 44 230 4 21/7 Saint Omer Lille 4h40 65 […]
…but it’s a beautiful morning in Reading. This is the view looking down the canal towards the town centre. I live in the block of flats behind the camera. Which you can’t see. And actually it’s a phone. I’ll shut up.
This organisation have their annual meeting in London at the start of March. I wonder if it would be worth going along? I don’t consider myself a pilgrim due to my complete lack of any religious belief, but could be interesting. It describes the meeting on their website: “The Practical […]
Following on from the previous post which refers to academic research in the USA, I have just received this interesting email from Todd Rygh in Washington State along the same lines. Most people who contact me via this blog have questions about the route or the bike or the equipment […]
This refers to the children rather than the teachers – see the extract from the CTC weekly email – but after another week of winter commuting to work, I am aching for the Spring to arrive with its lighter mornings and evenings and slightly warmer temperatures. Whether I am still […]
What a great web page – so colourful!
I asked my boss today if I could have three days (unpaid) leave at the end of the academic year – Monday 19th to Wednesday 21st July. She said yes! So the date of departure is fixed: Sunday 18th July 2010. This gives me a full six weeks […]
This is a great blog (not mine, the one in the title, although mine is OK too…): blog.ch3.gr . Georgios writes: “In August 2009, after being in the Uk for 7 years, I decided it was time to move back to Greece. My ambitious plan was to cycle […]
A photographer, Patrick Taylor, appears to be a fan of the Ridgeback Panorama. Have a look on his website. Here is one of his pictures:
Iain Harper has contacted me via the Bike Radar forum I mentioned yesterday. There is some really useful practical advice in his email and it is worth the read. As the list of “tags” at the end shows, he manages to pack in a whole host of different […]
The light dusting of crisp, dry, white snow was actually quite fun to cycle on. Not really very icy at all. And across the Oxfordshire countryside, the nearly full moon was reflected off the white layer on the ground to make the morning feel, ironically, almost spring-like.
