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…
Author: Rob Ainsley
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…
B2J 1: Barrow to Patterdale
So, this is Barrow to Jarrow, another rhyming coast to coast, starting this morning at Barrow-in-Furness at the southwest extremity of the Lakes. I dipped my wheels in the tetchy surf on a windy pebbly beach on Walney Island (picture). Barrow is, of anywhere in the UK, the place most people want to get away…
L2T 2: Tiverton Parkway to Teignmouth
Cycling over the previous few days has felt like the Argentinian economy: either soaring up or plummeting down, and with perpetual U-turns. But today Normal Cycle Touring Service was resumed: unremarkable but agreeable back-lanes cycling through undulating countryside. It was south Devon, but could have been anywhere in England. At Broadhembury, a pleasant thatchy village…
L2T 1: Lynmouth to Tiverton Parkway
A glorious mixture of cycling today, starting with the punishing climb from Lynmouth to Lynton (above). The historic funicular (a Latin-derived adjective meaning ‘very expensive’) railway whisks you and bike up the cliff in two minutes for £5.30, which makes it slightly cheaper per second than Cross Country trains. Several hours of lovely moors cycling…
L2T 0: Lynmouth
We (me and Nigel) have arrived in Lynmouth, on the north Devon coast, to start the Lynmouth to Teignmouth rhyming Coast to Coast tomorrow. We got here by cycling from Plymouth to Ilfracombe along the Sustrans Devon Coast to Coast route. And then by pushing from Ilfracombe to Lynmouth, thanks to north Devon’s boom-and-bust ups…
Middlesbrough: Playing bridge
Middlesbrough, Yorkshire’s northernmost industrial town, is home to an iconic Transporter Bridge (pic) – one of only eight or so in the world still operating. It’s quite a metaphor for the area, and possibly for me: heavy, old-tech, struggling to grind on into the 21st century. Transporter Bridges were constructed around the turn of the…