Adventure

Le Grand Tour: From ‘It Was Breezy…’ To ‘…The T-shirt’

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Last weekend I completed the first draft of my fourth book, provisionally called Le Grand Tour. 159,600 words from the first – ‘It was breezy…’ – to the last – ‘…the T-shirt’. It tells the tale of my 2022 circular cycle from the Hook of Holland to the Hook of Holland. As to when it gets published, I’m not able to say with great accuracy. It will most likely be self-published (as were the first two books) and if that is indeed the case, I suspect that publication around Easter would be a reasonable guess. I have made some efforts to approach publishers and if it does get picked up by one of them (Summersdale who published book 3 no longer publish many travelogues), the publication date would probably be pushed further into the year. Finishing the first draft of the book is the main reason why things have gone quiet on other front, notably when it comes to new episodes of The Cycling Europe Podcast. That should hopefully now change.

In anticipation of the new book being published, I have reduced the price of the eBook versions of the first two books to just 99p on Amazon. I have no control over the third book but it’s still only ยฃ3.99. You have a few months in which to catch up if you haven’t yet read those three.

Many of you have already watched the films that I produced in late 2022 which tell the story of the cycle in four parts. If you haven’t yet seen them, they are all available on the Cycling Europe YouTube channel.

And there are, of course, the series of podcasts that were recorded, edited and published as I travelled. The links below will allow you to listen to them directly on this website but they are widely available across all the podcast platforms. Just search fro ‘Le Grand Tour’ and they’ll appear. Further links are available on The Cycling Europe Podcast page of the website.

I can’t decide whether it would be better to watch and/or listen to the videos and the podcasts before you read the book or after. I’ll leave it to you to decide.

Perhaps the best way to delve a little into the journey but without too many spoilers is to read the article I wrote for Cycling UK’s Cycle magazine last year. You can do so by visiting this page of CyclingEurope.org. It appeared originally in the magazine which you can now read online (you’ll need to download the individual page PDF files) by following this link. It has also been published on the EuroVelo website by the European Cyclists’ Federation.

Alternatively, you could just whet your appetite for the book with a few pretty pictures… Keep watching this space for publication updates!


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Visit the dedicated Grand Tour page of CyclingEurope.org to find out more about the 2022 cycle along some of western Europeโ€™s most iconic cycle routes.

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Categories: Adventure, Cycling, Le Grand Tour, Travel

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