Heavy rain is no problem with decent waterproofs, which will keep you dry all day. Unfortunately I only have half-decent waterproofs, so I was only dry for the first half of today. It bucketed down with rain incessantly, so by one o’clock I was soaking wet. Still, I got the authentic Cornish experience – fishing-village…
Author: Rob Ainsley
Britain 1: Land’s End to St Austell
This was me at Land’s End this morning, starting my End to End to End to End. I’d only cycled there from Penzance, ten miles away, but I must have looked knackered when I turned up. Everyone thought I was arriving from John o’Groat’s. Anyway, from Land’s End I set off with an obliging tailwind…
Canal du Midi: Midi life crisis
I was in France last week, cycling the Canal du Midi (picture). The 240km long engineering marvel, linking Toulouse with Beziers via Carcassonne (and hence, with other watercourses, the Atlantic and the Med) offers a flat, traffic-free cyclable route through the south of France. What’s not to like? Well, er, quite a lot, actually. The…
Amsterdam: IJ spy cyclists
I’ve just got back from a few days in Amsterdam. Everyone cycles here of course, except stag-party Brits, so I took a bike (picture) to ensure I wasn’t mistaken for one of them. It worked: the prostitutes ignored me. Also, when I bumped into another cyclist, momentarily forgetting which side of the cycle path I…
W2W 3: Barnard Castle to Sunderland
The pub breakfast, served by a friendly lass wearing a dressing gown and a smile, was a fryup that could have set up a bodybuilder for a cage fight, or even a touring cyclist for a sixty-mile jaunt to the end of the W2W. I stopped to gawp at the remarkably impressive Bowes Museum, an…
W2W 2: Kendal to Barnard Castle
The fire alarm jolted me awake at 7am, but it quickly became apparent it was a toast-related false alarm. At least it got me out of bed in time for early breakfast – and yes, the toast did have a taste of charcoal – and I was on the road by eight. I like supporting…
W2W 1: Barrow to Kendal
The Walney to Wear, aka W2W, is the most obscure of the standard Coast to Coast routes. Roaming 155 hilly and often remote miles from Barrow to Sunderland, it’s tackled mainly by nerdy completists and people with nothing better to do. So of course I was riding it. My early morning train from York rolled…
Madrid: Nobody cycles, except all these people
I’ve just come back from Madrid. As the pleasant young man in Tourist Info confidently told me when I asked for a bike map, there isn’t such a thing. Nobody cycles in Madrid. Last Sunday (top right and bottom right) I rode past several thousand of those nobodies, on the new 10km riverside cycle path…
B2J 3: Edmundbyers to Jarrow
Most of today’s short concluding run was on NCN14, the well-surfaced railtrail (picture) that takes grateful C2Cers downhill from Consett into Newcastle. It has two sorts of ‘Cyclists: Slow’ signs. One is because there are narrow barriers coming up at a road crossing, in which case you should slow down; the other also says ‘Give…
B2J 2: Patterdale to Edmundbyers
Alongside Ullswater (picture) to start with, and a visit to see Aira Force, the waterfall area which claims to be the inspiration of Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’. Clearly he, like me, beat the tourist rush by coming here at 7.30am. Outside Penrith I joined the C2C (Coast to Coast) Sustrans route. In…