Cycling adventures across Yorkshire, Britain and beyond
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…
Today I drew a line in the sand for my journey. Metaphorically. And also literally. Because the line was in the sand of the railtrail west from Jaunpiebalga, and it was about two inches deep. It had looked a promising cycle route on Openstreetmap, marked enigmatically ‘MG’, following the old rail line out to Gulbene….
The forecast was for drizzle all day, so I wrapped everything in plastic bags, put my sunhat, sunblocker and sunglasses out of reach, donned my rainjacket, and set off. For the next twelve hours it was sunny and baking hot. It was also, rarely for the gravel-based Latvian rural road network, tarmac all day. Even…
The first proper day of the Latvian End to End involved some border setbacks, abandoned villages, roads with skaters, and the first taste of what will undoubtedly be many gravel roads. A rather crunchy, dusty taste. First I had to get from my guesthouse in Alūksne to my intended start: the border tripoint of Estonia,…
I’m going Baltic for my latest End to End, riding Latvia’s quiet back roads through woods. In fact, outside its busy eurocapital Rīga, the entire country is quiet back roads through woods. Latvia is also as flat as a Saturday night karaoke singer – the highest point is barely three hundred metres, though from the…
The marshy levels around Aveiro, south of Porto, are great fun to explore by bike. Partly because of the birdlife – flamingoes, storks – but also because of the boardwalks you can ride along: kilometre after kilometre of clanky wooden planks. It’s like cycling to the accompaniment of Taiko drummers. We were there because we’d…
Final days of End to Ends can be a curious mixture of climax and anti-climax. When I completed my first – Land’s End to John o’Groats, in 1997 – I was literally in tears of joy and surprise, rang all my friends to tell them, and had a slap-up champagne dinner at JoG House Hotel….
Last night’s guesthouse came with the bonus of a petrol station/cafe run by the same lady. So like the drivers we could fuel up, except with coffee and home-made pastéis de nata, not petrol. Though one local was getting stuck in to his own morning rocket fuel, in the shape of macieira – Portuguese brandy,…
The longest day of the entire trip – and the flattest. We left Abrantes by crossing the Tejo, greeted immediately by the N2’s arrow-straight road across the dusty flatlands of the Alentejo. Goodbye hills the colour of emerald and avocado, hello wheatfield plains the colour of… er, wheat. And hello cows. Also, hello cork. We’ve…