At some point in the not-too-distant future, CyclingEurope.org will publish its 4,000th post. That’s since August 2008. The website has published at least one post in every single month since April 2009 but in recent times, they have been thin on the ground. There’s a drop-down menu over there on the right and you’ll see that in the first five months of 2025 there have been just 15 published articles, and a few of those come under the ‘sponsored’ banner (that keeps CyclingEurope.org afloat financially, along with the admittedly annoying adverts…). But summer is approaching fast and, following on from the previous post, I can reveal that I have indeed ordered ny n+1, a Ribble CGR Ti Enthusiast bike. Hopefully this injection of new kit into my small collection of bicycles will inspire me to start posting more regularly on the site.

You can read more about the new bike here on the Ribble website (or in the previous post of course). Purchased via the Cycle-to-Work scheme, the administration took some time and now there is a delivery delay of a few weeks. I was hoping to have it in my hands by the half-term holiday but unless there is a rapid change in circumstances at the Ribble factory, that’s not going to happen. (The half-term holiday started yesterday.) The motivation for buying a slightly different type of bike – one that will carry minimal, if any, luggage – was to engage in more regular cycle-travel that will involve loading the bike on the back of the car and driving off for a few days. Camping, hostelling, that kind of thing (no change there) but with the kit transported by the car rathar than the bicycle, the requirement for panniers and racks is all but eliminated. Who knows? Perhaps one day it might inspire me to do some credit-card touring and embrace the lifestyle of a touring cyclist who sleeps naked under the sun, washes his padded shorts in the sink and comes home carrying the odour of out-of-date cheese. We shall see… As from September I will be reducing my hours as a teacher down to four days per week. Fingers crossed, this will give me lots of three-day weekends to play with; lots of opportunities to jump in the car and explore.

It is thus with a dollop of irony that you will be able to read my thoughts about the glory that is fully panniered cycle touring in the upcoming edition of Cycling UK’s Cycle Magazine. It will be dropping on members’ doormats in the next week or so but I’ve just seen an online preview of a few pages of the magazine on Issu and one of the selected pages happens to be the one that features yours truly. Wanda, my Koga WorldTraveller, appears in some of the pictures (coffee pot and bike in France, signage and bike on the Outer Hebrides and bike on the Portuguese coast near Porto), as do I on a chilly day on Anglesey back in 2020. (I don’t take many pictures of me and the bike, hence the requirement to trawl back nearly five years to find this one.)

You may find the ‘kit list’ of particular interest. Please don’t read into my purchase of the n+1 that I have given up on my traditional pannier tours. Wanda will hopefully continue to carry me many years into the future to far flung places across the UK, the European continent and perhaps even beyond. It’s just that I have nothing currently planned along those lines.

All that aside, following the rebranding of Cycling UK earlier in the year, I do like the look of the rebranded magazine. The orange does seem to work well. The article to which I contributed is the ‘How I Roll’ headline article that also features the thoughts of Susanna Thornton, Cass Gilbert and Josh Reid.

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Le Grand Tour on a Bike Called Wanda, was published in May 2024 and recounts Andrew P. Sykes’ journey around France, into the Alps and down the Rhine in the summer of 2022. It is available as a paperback and as and eBook from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com (and other international Amazon sites). The paperback is also available from Waterstones or Foyles and the eBook from Apple iBooks.

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