One world of cycle touring: Latest posts

A day of gentle, quiet paths through woods, farms and river plains. Not much happened, but it happened enjoyably. With heavy rain forecast I booked a hostel in Tours for tonight, a mere 59km away according to the sign outside last night’s campsite. An hour along the path, all delightfully quiet, Tours was now ‘56km’....

A good full day of easy riverside riding today, involving all the Loire tropes: cathedrals and chateaux, latticework bridges, bike-friendly campsites, wineries, giant wine bottles, tripe sausages, crushed Renaults, and nuclear power stations. My campsite last night was only five miles from Angers, a fine cathedral and castle city, so I nipped up for a...

After two short days I thought I’d better get some miles in, and with half-decent weather forecast, planned a substantial day of sixty-odd miles. It was fairly easy, thanks to the Loire path being well-signed, flat, smooth, and with cars outnumbered by artisan boulangeries. It would have been even better if some of them had...

When I started my mug of Yorkshire tea this morning it was bright sunshine. By the time I finished it was torrential rain. And it’s not a very large mug. Yes, the weather has abruptly turned for the worse, like a hitherto friendly drunk in the pub who suddenly takes offence at some imagined insult....

What do cycling writers do on holiday, when they’re not writing about a cycle tour? They go on a cycle tour. Hoping they might be able to write about it later on. But I’ve had the Loire Valley on my radar for a long time, and at last I’m doing it: 600km of flat, easy...

It may sound like a medieval church reformer, but Bishop Wilton – thanks to an article on unknown hidden-gem villages in the Sunday Times last weekend – has suddenly become East Yorkshire’s most famous secret place. So I couldn’t resist the excuse to visit it this sunny day, as part of a scenic amble round...

Scotland’s highest cyclable tarmac road is, delightfully, closed to motor traffic. It’s the access to a NATS air-traffic control radar station and suite of comms towers up the top of Lowther Hill. They’re a couple of miles’ ascent from Wanlockhead, Scotland’s highest village – which, surprisingly for some, is not in the Highlands but down...

The twentyish miles between Killin, on the end of Loch Tay, and Trossachs-gateway Callander, are some of my favourite bits of the National Cycle-route Network. NCN7 runs, and occasionally stumbles over rocks, nearly 550 sometimes questionable miles in its entirety from Sunderland to Inverness. I’ve done this section of it a couple of times before,...

Resuming my trip between place names so long it may be quicker to ride it than say it, I set off from Porthmadog this grey morning after surviving a brush with Storm Lilian. A wet, and hairy, brush. I enjoyed cycling across the Cob, a train/road/bike path causeway over marshland overlooked by hills. Then it...

It blew up, literally, about half four in the morning. The wind abruptly swung from the west and now, unshielded by the hedgerows, I was suddenly getting the full force of 70mph gusts. The tent was being almost flattened, the poles ready to snap. There was no chance of taking the tent down in this...