first proper cycle of the year - 16/02/2014

England's weather this year has been atrocious, there hasn't been a day without rain. So a lot of training has been done inside on turbo trainers in the garage and in the front room on an old early 90's exercise bike. Though it doesn't compare to being out on the road, its better than drowning or risking being washed away by a hortonian overland flow (geography nerd).

I was bored waiting for Andy so I downloaded a montage app and took some pictures.

 

So the date was set, I awoke early on Sunday morning, opened the curtains and saw the garden alit with beautiful sunlight. Excitedly I got out of bed and readied myself. Annoyingly to cycle with Andy I had to drive back to Bedfordshire. But once there and the Joycey's had finally stopped faffing around with their bikes and more likely gizmos which give them 0.01 second advantages over a Spanish layman on his bici cycling up hills. We all set off. It is still cold currently i think it was about 10C today, but still I figured shorts and top should be enough (which it was). But not for Mr Andy, oh no, he had enough clothing on to survive an Artic trek with Captain Scott whilst being battered by Katabatic winds. Needless to say he still bemoaned the cold weather.

You can see correctly - I am taking a photo whilst cycling at 22mph. #ItsTooEasy



The cycling went like a dream, all the training had clearly helped. Taking a few selfies and photos en route. Only moment of drama was some from some crazed horse riders. Apparently you have to shout at them, otherwise they shout at you. A strange game they like to play. We also encountered a lot of other cyclists - it was like caterpillars emerging from their chrysalis (but cyclists from their homes). We ended up completing 30 miles, which i think is a respectable distance for the first time out, averaging about 15 mph.

Summary of the ride.

 



Planning/ Training

25/12/2013

It's Christmas Day, and I have received a road bike from my parents!! The planning for Andy Joyce and myself (Tom Austin), yet another wildly ambitious, cycle ride to a far away land neither of us have been to before. The location was chosen based on the same sort of random reasons we chose to cycle to Barcelona before. Which included; have we both been there before?, is it far away?, will the countries we go to speak a language we do not understand?, have we been sitting around drinking too much recently? etc etc. So the answers to these questions to Joycey gave him the final answer of Stockholm. Luckily my geography is better than his, and i pointed out it is further to go to Stockholm than it is to cycle to Barcelona - and given we now have work and have to take time off etc this probably wasn't the best place to go to. So looking at a map Copenhagen was somewhere in between the two. So that was it, decided, Copenhagen will be the destination of choice.

Receiving my new bike for Christmas

 So, looking at google maps one day i guessed we could cycle to Harwich get the ferry to hook of holland, then up to Aarhus in Denmark and cycle over the big bridges which connect the islands of Denmark together and then to Copenhagen. Easy. But as i looked into it a bit more the idea of cycling across the islands became less and less likely. This is because the bridges are motorway bridges, and after some research i found that it is strictly forbidden to cycle on motorways in Denmark - and after our experiences of cycling on motorways in France and Spain i refused to yet again cycle on a motorway again. so some re-routing would be needed. There are numerous ferry ports which go from Germany and Denmark - but i couldnt for the life of me find one that took bikes or went anywhere useful. I was on the brink of giving up and saying to Joycey we would have to cycle to another destination... When for some reason i typed into google something like "bike tours to Copenhagen" i stumbled across a website offering a tour from Berlin to Copenhagen, eureka! i thought, they must have to get across the Baltic sea somehow. So i read there tour and it said they crossed from a Port in Rostock. Woohoo, our ticket to Denmark!

The total mileage thus will be around 800 miles. But minus ferry trips works out to be just over 700 miles. We know from past experiences we can (could) cycle 100 miles per day. So 7 days should be enough. We have now booked ferry tickets from Harwich to Hook of Holland on May 31st. Let the training begin! (Today is 26/01/2014)

Training Day 1....