Cycling adventures across Yorkshire, Britain and beyond
The wonderful solar system model on the York to Selby cycle path, which I blogged earlier this week, is not York’s only cyclable scale model of the planets. There’s another on the university campus, installed in 2016, in which the distance between planets is much more walkable thanks to a scale of 1 in 2…
To boldly go between York and Selby, on the flat car-free path that follows the old railway, is to travel the entire solar system. Because you pass a 1:575,872,239 scale model of the Sun and planets, a millennium initiative of York University, getting a vivid feel for just how empty space is. The sun is…
With the End to End done, I holed up in a cheap hotel in Liepāja for a few days to catch up on sleep, laundry, writing assignments etc. I did manage to explore the place by bike meanwhile, though. Which is the best way to do so, as it’s a Marmite sort of town: not…
I completed my Latvian End to End in emphatic fashion today, dipping my front wheel in the Baltic at the beach in Liepāja, the country’s westernmost place. The guidebook calls the town ‘gritty’, and it certainly was: the ferocious seaside winds kept blowing sand into my gob. Which is odd, because one thing I’ve got…
Another short day, made shorter by winds unexpectedly favourable. Shortly outside Kuldīga I had the welcome sight of communications towers, showing I’d reached some sort of summit. But this is a land where the highest waterfall is dwarfed by a bungalow. There are potholes in Britain deeper than this ‘summit’ was high. Between Kuldīga and…
Latvia’s Niagara Falls, Latvia’s Venice, and Latvia’s Pub Brawl Capital: welcome to Kuldīga, where there really is plenty to write home about. If you can find a postcard. Good luck with that. After a week of sun, the forecast today was gloomy: heavy rain between ten and three, horrible headwinds after that. So I was…
With strong westerlies forecast for my final westward riding, I’ve set up four short days. I’m not here to break records, I’m here to have a good time. I’d rather be happy than right any day. I just wish I knew which day. Today was essentially a one-pattern ride, along tarmac roads through woods and…
The coast was clear today. So I rode along it. Cyclists ‘doing the Baltics’ usually follow the coastline, whereas my End to End of Latvia is mostly inland. (The joke being, of course, that you rarely see the sea from Latvia’s ‘coastal’ roads: they’re generally a few hundred metres away from shore, screened by pine…
It’s only 35 miles between Sigulda and Riga. The road route is unsuitable for bikes because it’s a busy expressway. Locals ride on the shoulder, but it can change abruptly in width and surface. I’m all for experiences of the real, everyday, local Latvia, but A&E is not one of them. However, the cycle route…
Castles, caves, camels; wild swims, nuclear bunkers and black swans; ski-slopes, bobsleigh runs and glimpses of Switzerland. Today was short on distance but big on variety. My hostel breakfast provided excellent company, because I had the place to myself. With time in hand I could then wander round Cēsis’s parks and old town streets. In…