Cycling adventures across Britain and beyond
After three years of itchy feet and cooling my heels – pandemic restrictions have been bad for mental health, but also podiatry – I’m doing another international End to End at last. This one’s Slovakia, a country I’ve been through briefly a few times and liked, so I’m back to do it properly. Which, for…
It was all very 1826 this morning. Partly this was because I cycled across the magnificent Menai Bridge (pic), one of the world’s first suspension jobs. And also because I’d had no wifi, internet, phone or postal access in my Premier Inn. To communicate with the outside world I’d have needed smoke signals. Once across,…
I’d planned a short day. I’d had vague aspirations of stopping off en route to walk up Snowdon, assisted by the rack’n’ruin railway. Unfortunately the train was only running part way up, so I wouldn’t have time for any summit-bagging today. It was a swoosh down from Ffestiniog to the valley floor (pic) and a…
An early start, into the sheepy fields. I climbed laboriously up the mountain road towards Machynlleth past Dylife Gorge (pic). I was heading towards the highest point on the Lôn Las Cymru after Gospel Pass – 510m above sea level, and usually 100m above bottom of the cloud level. Indeed, when I did this bit…
I had a quick morning spin around Llandrindod Wells’s lake (pic). Locals proudly told me about the new cycle path around its kilometre or so circumference. ‘Cycle path’ sounds grander than it is, which is a solid-line lane marked off from the perimeter road, but it’s wide and pleasant enough. LW is a Victorian spa…
I pedalled up from my bargain Premier Inn room to meet Jack – who was riding with me for the day – at his house on the edge of Abergavenny. We picked some apples from his orchard to take with us and scooted along the back lanes up to Gospel Pass, Wales’s highest road at…
I’ve done End to Ends of Britain, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, even the Isle of Man. Not Wales though – well, not exactly. I did Cardiff to Holyhead in 2000, and St David’s to Llandudno in 2013, both of them traverses of sorts. That first trip was along the Lôn Las…
After a few days mixing writing work with exploring Gdansk, I still had five days to spare. So I took a train to Berlin. I had no plan, but I had a bike, which is all you need. This post covers those five days. The first morning I cycled across Tempelhof, on possibly the world’s…
With the business part of the trip completed, today was a fun add-on: a trip to Hel and back. Hel is a resort village at the end of a 30km long sand spit that juts out south-east from Poland’s northern coast into the Baltic. On a map the spit resembles Spurn Point, my favourite place…
The final day of my Polish End to End was the hottest, sunniest day of the trip so far. It started with yet more miles of mostly decent urban cycleways, continued with rough and unready tracks through country parks with lots of other leisure cyclists, and finished up at Poland’s most northerly point, overlooking an…