…but the nearest you’ll get to it on a cold, damp Monday in April. The real thing takes place in July as this colourful poster, one of several on display in the city centre, makes clear: However, not far from the bull ring in a shopping street I […]
The route network that has inspired me to cycle across the continent two and a bit times (hopefully three times by the end of July) is twenty years old. This from the European Cycling Federation’s Eurovelo website: “It was twenty years ago that the World Trade Organization was […]
Before setting off on this little trip across the continent I wrote a piece for the website about my plans for cycling through each of the seven countries from Spain to Norway. I’m now nearly finished in Spain – just the small matter of climbing the Pyrenees tomorrow […]
Click here to see the detailed statistics of today’s cycle. Today was hard work but ultimately a great day of not just cycling but simply travelling. The weather was very similar to cycling day 13 earlier this week and the arrival in Pamplona as wet as my arrival […]
Click here to see the detailed statistics of today’s cycle. Not long before I get to the French border and today’s modest 50 km nudged me a little closer. The destination was chosen because it has a campsite where I arrived in the early afternoon amid the noise […]
Some great pre-breakfast scenery this morning and the first vines I’ve seen since arriving in Spain. It’s interesting to note that the ones seen here have all been recently replanted, presumably following the disruption involved in building the new motorway just next to the N road that I’m […]
Click here to see the detailed statistics of today’s cycle. Peter and Sandra, my neighbours on the campsite in Burgos, provided me with a nice cup of coffee this morning. The discussion we had continued from where it had left off the previous evening. Interestingly they had been […]
Click here to see the detailed statistics of today’s cycle. If an antidote had been required for yesterday’s humdrum, wet, cold, uninspiring, boring, gloomy [OK we get the idea; please move on…] cycle to Palencia from Benavente (if you dare, read cycling day 13), then the last 24 […]
Click here to see the detailed statistics of today’s ride. If you think what I’m doing is glamorous (No? You never thought that? Oh…) then think again. At least as far as today’s cycling goes. It was most definitely a Mercedes day (see Paul, Mercedes Days and Seville). […]
Click here to see the detailed statistics of today’s ride. Today I feel as though a pilgrim… Of sorts. It will come as no surprise whatsoever to hear that upon my return to the Plaza Mayor in Zamora this morning I bumped into Dirk, the German guy who […]
As I said at the end of the previous post, I wasn’t expecting much from Zamora but what a nice, relaxing place. If you are into your Romanesque churches, this is the place to come. According to the Rough Guide (that I should have consulted before thinking of […]
Click here to see the detailed statistics of today’s ride. A shortish cycle today – just 66 km – but the average has only slightly been dented, down to 74.5 km. I’ll try to keep it with 5 km of the magic 75 km over the coming weeks […]
My departute from Salamanca is a little delayed as the bike is getting a check over at a local bike shop and they weren’t able to do the job until later this morning. The extra time has allowed me to do one thing that’s been playing on my […]
So many pictures today that I have split my collection into two. The first group were all taken within or from the tower of the Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca. I’ll post the second group a little later this evening.
Click here to see the detailed statistics of today’s cycle. [Saturday evening: Too tired to write the blurb tonight but come back tomorrow for the full story. The stats and pictures will hopefully suffice for the moment. Some of the photos do need explaining…] It’s now Sunday morning […]
Click here to see the detailed statistics of today’s cycle. An interesting day… I had no great expectations that it would be. Just another few hours trundling along the N-630. I set off with no definite destination in mind; the plan was to cycle as far as Carcaboso […]
Click here to see the detailed statistics of today’s cycle. It required a short climb out of Mérida this morning to rejoin my almost constant companion on this leg of the cycle, the N-630, but it wasn’t too many minutes into cycling along the road that I stopped […]
I’ve written much about the quality of road signs across Europe from the perspective of the travelling cyclist; French – the benchmark of excellence, Swiss – disappointingly poor (no distances), Italian – oh dear… (More details on the books). But I have to say that Spanish signs rival […]
Pair 1: bought at an outdoor shop in the UK, lost somewhere in or near Tarifa on cycling day one. Pair 2: bought at El Cortes Inglés in Seville for about £11, broken at some point in the following 12 hours. My fault? Probably. Too late to return […]
Click here to see the detailed statistics of today’s cycle This risks being quite short as I’m very tired… I really want to avoid cycling 100 km + days but I’ve just my first. There will, inevitably, be others, but with the average distance that I need to […]
I’ve seen pictures of this before but on my two previous visits to Seville never got to see it. Not quite sure why as it’s in the city centre… It’s an extraordinary building but not as old as you might think. Built in the 1920s for an international […]
The Ruta/Via de la Plata is clearly quite a famous thing in Spain as most people that I have mentioned it to in the last couple of months immediately recognise the name at the very least. Most, in addition, know something about it. I knew nothing about it […]
Click here to see the detailed statistics of today’s cycle. Not masses to write about the cycling today as it was simply a case of finding the N-IV (no idea what the significance of that name is) in north-east Jerez and following it all the way not just […]
Click here to see the detailed statistics of today’s cycle. Finally, it’s started! I’m sure you are as relieved as me… It was a soggy morning back in Tarifa (see previous post) but after that very virtuous breakfast it was off to knock on the door of the […]
The plan this morning was to first spend an hour or so meandering my way along the edge of the rock so as to complete a full circumnavigation. OK, it’s not perhaps the British Isles but it would at least give me claim to having visited most things […]
It’s a curious place. Dont get me wrong; I actually quite like it (and my hotel – the Rock Hotel – is wonderful), but it is slightly strange. I’m sure that I’m not the first person to make such a comment. It’s British but not quite British. It’s […]
So, not the first day of cycling from the southernmost point of Europe to the northernmost point, but the first day of cycling any kind of distance on a fully loaded bike. It was a straightforward journey along the coast although I when I looked out of the […]
If you ever need to reignite your faith in the wider cycling community then I can suggest few better people to meet than Roman and his colleagues at Yep Bike in San Pedro, just south of Marbella on the Costa del Sol. I first contacted Roman a couple […]
Sunday night near Estepoba on the Costa del Sol in southern Spain… The start of the cycle approaches fast but here’s a quick summary of the last few days… If you were paying attention back at the start of March (no? You should be ashamed…) you will remember […]
After having left Cádiz it was back to Estepona yesterday to pick up Reggie (the bike) but my uncle Ron had pieced together a full but very enjoyable day of sightseeing before I was finally able to hit the sack in a comfortable bed (first time in five […]
The original plan, as noted in last night’s post, was to go kayaking. Alas it was too windy and all such activities had been cancelled. Instead I went with one of my teachers José (with the beard), his girlfriend and my fellow student Glen to the Parque Metropolitano […]
Earlier today I attended my final lesson at the K2 Internacional language school here in Cádiz. The choice was a bit random and based primarily upon the school’s location on what looked like a nice square in the old part of town (and the impressive video on their […]
I would happily class myself as an enthusiastic early adopter of technology, especially when it comes to cycling. Back in 2009 when I cycled along the Pennine Cycleway as a shakedown of my skills as a first time touring cyclist I blogged as I travelled having moved on from writing […]
You may remember – I’ve certainly mentioned it on here before, and probably elsewhere – that one of the principal reasons for choosing to study Spanish at the K2 language school here in Cádiz was not just its general location in the heart of the old part of […]
The plan is that two weeks today – Thursday 9th April – I will be standing somewhere near the southernmost point of the European mainland looking north and thinking “here we go again…” (or even, “bloody hell, here we go again…”). Between now and then, my time is […]
I promised this a couple of weeks ago so here it is; the post with all the bikes of Cádiz, or at least some of them. I wouldn’t want to give the impression that the city is up there at the top of the European premier league of […]
Can I just get something off my chest? Or indeed off my bed here in Cádiz. Digestive biscuits as sold by Carrefour here in Spain are not to be mistaken with what most of you and I would consider to be a ‘digestive’ biscuit. Far too sweet, far […]
If you’ve got election fatigue in the UK, spare a though for the poor people in Spain. This year they have a triple whammy of local, regional and national elections to ‘look forward’ to. The election season kicked off yesterday with regional elections here in Andalucia and the […]
There’s a a feeling you get when visiting El Puerto de Santa Maria that its glory days are in the distance past. But what glory days they were; Columbus sailed from here on one of his journeys to the Americas and the first map of the Americas was […]
The photograph below has been inspired by BikeTourGlobal on Instagram doing something similar. That said, it follows on from the photograph that I posted to CyclingEurope.org back in February (which is also at the foot of this post) showing all of the equipment I will be taking with […]
I mentioned The Pillars of Hercules in the previous post and it gave me an idea for a dreary afternoon in Cádiz; see how many of them I could spot in coats of arms dotted around the city. The predominant coat of arms shown below is the one […]
Thursday is turning out to be the night of indulgence. In previous weeks it has been tapas and this week it has been the turn of beer. That said the indulging was limited and it was more of a late afternoon event than a full-blown evening one but […]
If you bump into Professor Henry Higgins in the near future, would you mind pointing out that currently the rain is Spain seems to be falling mainly on Andalucia and especially the corner where Cádiz is located. However, my mood has lifted somewhat from the mid-Cádiz blues that […]
The title might have persuaded you not to bother reading this but for those of you still here… It’s not been a great day. Nothing bad has happened. I haven’t been thrown onto the streets of Cádiz or expelled from the language school or anything like that. It’s […]
The second day of our Andalucian road trip (see Saturday’s post for day one) set off inland and headed in an easterly direction to Arcos de la Frontera… …followed by lunch and a mid-afternoon stroll around Grazalema… …and finally a late afternoon visit to Zahara de la Sierra. […]
Bear with me on this one… Whatever you may think of grates and manholes (or indeed personholes as I suppose we should nowadays refer to them as), they do come in a great (no pun intended) variety of shapes and sizes. Indeed some are very small, others are […]
But that’s no bad thing. I’m here for a month and can’t do ‘important’ things every day. And it’s not saying that the ‘unimportant’ things that I did do were nevertheless uninteresting; they weren’t. So what were they? Well the lessons this morning of course (we were studying… […]
I’ve been wandering around Cadiz since my arrival last Saturday, so much of what I saw today on my first proper tour with a guide who knew what she was talking about – it was my teacher at the language school Christina – wasn’t new. But the Torre […]
My cunning plan to continue to use my mobile phone and 3G/4G data during my two months in Spain – see the details at length here – is not working quite as well as I thought it might. To avoid the £3 per day charge from Vodafone UK, I […]
The plan for today was – and still is – to spend a few hours reviewing my notes from the Spanish course that I completed during the last three months of 2014 at Reading College. I’m slowly getting a little better at coming up with the important bits […]
Today has been very reminiscent of my first day at university over twenty years ago. It started with goodbyes, handshakes and embraces with members of my family (my uncle and his wife standing in for my parents this time around) followed by a long journey on a bus […]
Today was spent in and around Estepona, the coastal Andalucian town where my uncle and his wife live. The bike having been delivered yesterday – I was expecting it today and was prepared for a long wait – I became a liberated man and we made the most […]
Before heading down to my uncle’s house near Estepona yesterday afternoon I took the opportunity of paying a morning visit to the Alcazba, the palace of the Moors. Not quite of Granada’s Alhambra standard but interesting nevertheless and as I was the only tourist in the place (there […]
I would normally write ‘Cycling Day’ or ‘Rest Day’ plus a number up there in the title but that clearly isn’t yet relevant to this part of 2015’s travels across Europe as for the first five or six weeks I’m not going to be doing much crossing of […]
About to leave Yorkshire after a brief stay of just three weeks to fly to Malaga, Spain. Reggie (the bike) may already be there… Back in six months!
A few weeks ago I moved away from Reading in Berkshire having lived there for just over fifteen years. I can clearly remember my first visit to the town in Spring 1999 when I was summoned to the university for an interview. It was a horribly wet and windy […]
The word of the weekend has been ‘packing’. On Saturday morning I transported the final items from my move from the south to my new ‘lock-up’ in Halifax (it’s actually a large wooden box in a former woollen mill) and then, after having packed most of my cycling […]
OK. You’ve seen what I’m taking, now have a look at how I packed (most of) it into one holdall ready to be transported by Luggage Mule to southern Spain next week:
If you hadn’t noticed, I’ve posted these country-specific commentaries about the upcoming Eurovelo 1/3 trip from southern Spain to northern Norway: Cycling in Spain Cycling in France Cycling in Belgium Cycling in Germany Cycling in Denmark Cycling in Sweden Cycling in Norway
Under two weeks now until departure and I’m finally beginning to piece things together in a serious way. The flight is purchased and the Spanish course booked but you already know that as you have read this, no? Yesterday I spent the day in Leeds in search of […]
So finally, after Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Belgium and France… I arrive at the beginning (if that makes sense), in Spain. If you remember, my posts about cycling through each of the countries of the Eurovelo 1/3 route that I will be following later in the year were […]
It’s been a busy few days since relocating back up to Yorkshire but I’m delighted that the whole process is now complete. I first started to plan my return to the county where I was born, brought up and educated over twelve months ago and everything has now […]
If you choose to use the service discussed below, you can now save 5% by using the discount code CYCEUR15 Cycling to southern Italy in 2010 it wasn’t a problem; I set off from my flat in Reading and just started pedalling. At the end of the journey in Brindisi, […]
OK, I’m now back in Elland after my ride up and then down (kind of – I caught the train from Hebden Bridge to Halifax and then cycled back along the Hebble Trail and then the canal) the Calder Valley. Apart from the simple joy of getting out […]
By Ben Smith I’ve been on short cycle tours before but January of this year saw me leave on my first trip that would stretch into weeks and months. The route was loose and fluid but the general plan was to get the ferry to Cherbourg in northern […]
Today is my last full day in my flat in Reading, Berkshire before I head north to Yorkshire for a few weeks then to Cadiz, Spain for a bit of language learning and then set off to cycle from Tarifa to Nordkapp. The new owner moves in tomorrow. Compared […]
So, after Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Belgium I arrive in France on my pre-Eurovelo 1/3 quest to have put at the very least a bit of thought into the planning of the route. Only one country to go – Spain – which will be the first of […]
UPDATE: You can now read the Henley Standard article referred to in this post online by following this link. It’s not often you make it onto the front page of a newspaper for bad reasons let alone for a good one but I’m please to say that I’ve managed to […]
After pondering over whether to buy some new Ortlieb panniers (see previous post), my mind remained focussed on the general theme of ‘equipment’. I really need to set some kind of budget for getting hold of what I need to buy. After having cycled across Europe twice already, I […]
It’s occasionally interesting to have a detailed look at the statistics that WordPress (the people who make this website function) furnish me with. You’d be surprised just how much information I know about you! For example, I know how many of you come here, what you read (well, I don’t […]
My journey across the continent continues… I have already posted planning notes on cycling through Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Germany. Here are my planning notes for Belgium after which only France and Spain need to be considered before I set off from Tarifa in Spain shortly after Easter. […]
While maps are on my mind (see previous post)… I have a newly discovered love for Marco Polo maps. But before I get on to them, let’s back track a little. I can’t imagine there will ever be a day when I ditch paper maps altogether; when I cycled […]
I was managing to write one of these country commentaries at the rate of one per weekend earlier in December but I’ve had a break for a few weeks over Christmas. Remember that they are not a complete overview of cycling in the particular country through which I […]
Alberto, Jenna, Martin, David, Marengo, Diego, Wade, Robert, Matthew, Ross, Kate, Sean, Alain, Carla, Eddy, John, Jane, and Ross all have something in common: I’ve met them through the accommodation sharing website for travelling cyclists called Warmshowers. Some have stayed with me, others have accommodated me on my […]
It’s perfectly normal at the fag end of the old year to reflect upon what has happened over the previous twelve months and look forward to the new year with vague (perhaps even precise) resolutions to do everything better than you did before. In the books I have […]
In May 2013 I posted this short piece about a book called “Traveling Light or Cycling Europe on Fifty Cents a Day”. You may want to read what I wrote at the time before continuing to read this. Done it? Good… Today is my final day of work […]
My final week in my current job – a languages teacher at Gillotts School in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire – has started; just five days to go. Reggie, my bicycle, is at the bike shop getting a full service (including new wheel rims and tyres as well as a reconditioned […]
I have arrived at country number three – in a reverse sense – after previously writing about Cycling In Norway and Cycling In Sweden. Denmark will, of course, be country number five after Spain, France, Belgium and Germany but in my quest not to neglect the latter part […]
Last weekend I wrote about cycling in Norway, the final country on my 3rd pan-European quest next year. I’m purposefully starting at the end and working backwards so as to avoid falling into the trap of thinking a lot about the first few countries in advance and ignoring those […]
It’s good to know that ‘Crossing Europe on a Bike Called Reggie‘ is still finding new fans. Here’s a review just posted by Daniel Cox on Amazon.co.uk (where you can currently download the eBook for just £1.55 – bargain!): “Given I thoroughly enjoy cycling and European travel, I had […]
When I cycled from Greece to Portugal in 2013, I spent most of my time pre-trip thinking about Greece, Albania and, to a certain extent, Croatia. I didn’t spend too much time considering the western European countries through which I would be cycling. In France, a country I know […]
I spend more time doing that than doing, if that makes sense. The focus of my recent thoughts has been the Spanish portion of my 2015 ride along the Eurovelo 3 from Santiago de Compostela to Trondheim (and then North Cape via the Eurovelo 1). A Twitter twit […]
At the risk of turning this site into an advert for learning Spanish in Salamanca, here’s the ‘official’ video to encourage you to do so! Please read the previous post to find out why it’s relevant. The purists amongst you will be delighted to see the the bicycle […]
I write this from an ever-so-slightly echoey flat. Last week my plans for 2015 took a significant step forward in that I moved the bulk of what is best described as my ‘stuff’ to Yorkshire and it is now sitting in a large heap in the garage of […]
This is one post that most definitely has nothing to do with cycling . Apologies. It has everything to do with, err… an office building. Reading, the town where I have lived since late 1999 (and which I will soon be leaving to return to Yorkshire albeit via […]
By Victoria Sharpe No matter how careful we might be when cycling, or how confident we might feel, the fact is that sharing the roads with motorised traffic reduces the quality of a ride. It feels more dangerous, it can be awkward to navigate, and there are exhaust […]
Not that I have done this yet, but it is part of next year’s plan to cycle along the Eurovelo 3 from Santiago de Compostela to Trondheim (and beyond, along the Eurovelo 1 to North Cape). Yesterday’s trip to London (see previous post / video) allowed me a […]
Danny MacAskill’s latest epic production – watch it here on YouTube – has got me thinking about using more video on this website. It wasn’t so much the video itself (which is just sublime) as the ‘making of’ documentary that I stumbled upon last night while looking for the […]
When it comes to writing pieces for this website, September is always a lean month. I’ve just been looking back at the number of posts made every month and since 2009 when CyclingEurope.org burst into life on the world wide web (albeit under the much less catchy soubriquet […]
I’m frequently contacted by people who are planning their own long-distance cycle and I’m always happy to reply. I do, however, often find myself repeating the same bits of core advice, so, here is my own top ten of things that I would recommend that every prospective long-distance […]
I didn’t know what was in store for me when I left the campsite in Scourie. I was glad to be leaving; despite being listed in the Cool Camping Scotland book that I had bought prior to the trip, the only cool aspect of the place (and here […]
Courtesy of Wordle, here are the top 100 words contained in Along The Med on a Bike Called Reggie… (see comments below) The top 100 words do not include very common English words. The word ‘cycling‘ appears 568 times in the book but the word ‘but‘ rears its […]
Well, I’ve got to have a press release, no? Press Release: ‘Along The Med on a Bike Called Reggie’ For immediate distribution Wednesday 30th July 2014, Reading, Berkshire We are delighted to announce the publication of the cycling travelogue ‘Along The Med on a Bike Called Reggie‘ by Yorkshire […]
Here are three guys who cycled along a similar route to me but from London Barcelona taking in large chunks of my 2010 journey from England to Italy and then my 2013 across southern France and into Spain. I wrote books about my adventures; these chaps have made […]
Here is the second in a series of extracts from the soon-to-be-published book ‘Along The Med on a Bike Called Reggie‘. If you haven’t done so already, you may want to read extract 1 (which was all about cycling day 11 in Albania) by following this link. Tuesday […]
My uncle, who lives in the south of Spain, has just sent me this article about the Vias Verdes cycle routes in Spain. It was originally posted on the website Eye on Spain / Max Abroad: The Best of Spain and I hope they don’t mind me republishing it […]
The ECF have just published an interview with me where I discuss this summer’s cycle from Greece to Portugal along the rough line of the Eurovelo 8. The interview can be found on the ECF’s increasingly useful Eurovelo website in a slighted edited form. The full interview is […]
Having just spent several hours doing this, I’m also going to elevate what is otherwise hidden away in the Eurovelo 8 section of the site to its own blog post. Here are the links to the original blog posts made during the trip along the Eurovelo 8 (or […]
I used to regularly post extracts from emails that I received on here but recently I seem to have stopped doing so. For no particular reason. It’s a delight to be asked about the routes that I have cycled and, quite often, those that I haven’t. I try […]
