Thank you to one of our valued Bikecation clients for today's guest blog.
In a brief moment between downpours, a member of our team headed off to the Cotswolds for a fabulous weekend of biking between glorious gastropubs and chic B+B’s – it’s an experience they would heartily recommend!
“A friend told me to check out a brand new bicycle holiday company called Bikecation: “best fun we’ve had for ages!”
That would normally send a shiver down my spine – the thought of hours of slogging on an uncomfortable saddle with some lycra-clad companions, leaving me walking like John Wayne and wondering where to put my spare inner tube.
Luckily Jamie, the nice man from Bikecation, reassured me at a very early stage. He could tailor a trip to any part of the UK (and soon to be Europe) that was cycle friendly and he would make sure we were comfortable – it would be our exclusive trip…so no interruptions from strange cycle nerds who wear their bicycle clips to bed.
We chose a Cotswold Trip lasting 2 days and 2 nights. We started out at an utterly charming gastro-pub/hotel called The Kingham Plough, where our guide Jamie joined us for dinner and talked us through the itinerary. Inevitably too much was eaten and drunk, so when the morning came our little group didn’t seem completely in love with the idea of hitting the saddle for the day.
Jamie had organised a collection of beautiful rental Peugeot bikes for us, while he carried an impressive array of spare parts and first aid on his bicycle. 18 miles was our target for the day, most of it to be accomplished before another mighty lunch in a pub.
Very quickly our group of 6 settled into a reasonable pace – it makes a big difference when you’re not joining a group of strangers – we could agree on a speed as we were friends and not worry about upsetting any Olympic athletes among us. We headed out of Kingham, towards Moreton In Marsh. During the course of the morning, we were on big main roads for about 300 metres. The rest of the time we had stunning country lanes to ourselves as we passed through villages untouched by the ravages of modern life.
Lunch was cleverly placed at the top of an alarmingly steep hill, so by the time we collapsed into the dining room, we were ready for a mountain of excellent pub food – just what we got!
A brief cycle of 5 miles in the afternoon took us to the ridiculously beautiful village of Chipping Camden, and to a B+B which was grander than many luxe hotels I’ve stayed at. With or without bikes, the Seymour House is well worth a visit.
The next morning we set out to gently bike back in a circle to Kingham. We stopped off at the fabulous Daylesford Farm for some refreshments and a snoop at some beautiful garden equipment, before heading off towards yet another glorious gastro-pub to refuel for the final stretch back to our cars.
Bikecation seamlessly organised for our bags to be moved between hotels and every meal was organised perfectly. They (rightly) recommend that you invest in a helmet, gloves and comfy padded bike trousers and bring some light but effective waterproofs. Aside from that, you’re ready to go. If you have your own bike, feel free to bring it, but make sure it has been properly serviced in advance and you have some spare inner tubes – the guide will fit them if you have a puncture.
If you want to strike out on your own, Bikeaction can organise your whole trip and give you full maps and directions, allowing you to have the freedom to explore without a guide. Personally I liked the guide – a little like skiing, it takes any of the stress out of having to think!!
Bikecation feature a variety of 4 and 5 day trips on their site, but will tailor shorter or longer excursions for you. They’re also busy looking at European adventures and give you some ideas for those as well. It’s a great escape for a group of friends, or a perfect weekend away with slightly older children.
I’m busy planning my next trip – heading for a coast to coast adventure ending in Newcastle!
Thank you to Mary-Jane from London - a Bikecation holiday-maker who submitted today's post.
I used to bike a lot when I was younger. In fact, it was my only form of transport: I didn’t own a car until I was 28.
Living in London, it was sometimes precarioius –riding along the Embankment at full pelt or dodging buses down the King's Road. I can even boast of being knocked down by a Number 11 bus on the Pimlico Road. Luckily I was fine though the bus didn’t stop! I got to work by bike, I went to the pub by bike, I visited friends by bike. I even went shopping by bike.
Eventually I decided it was time to grow up and get a driving licence. Third time lucky I passed in Wimbledon. I got married and had children and the automobile took over my two-wheeled friend as I became a taxi service to parties and activities. I had quite forgotten about my carefree days of pedaling to Battersea Park or roaring around Hyde Park Corner.
My waistline was getting bigger; my sedentary miles were clocking up. Then, two years ago my sister took up cycling. She did the London to Paris bike ride in aid of ‘Help the Heroes’. Still a Londoner, she got up early every morning and cycled around Richmond Park. She went cycling mad!! She loved it. She even cycled from London to my house in East Sussex. She said the bike ride to Paris was one of the best times in her life.
She awoke a memory in me. I remembered my days in Oxford cycling breathlessly uphill to Headington to get to my lectures on time or balancing Tesco bags on my handlebars wiggling down Cowley Road.
I am definitely a 'road biker' by nature: I’m nosy and like to see things when I’m cycling. Like Toad of Toad Hall, I love the 'open road'. So, last Autumn I went on my first Bikecation in the cotswolds. To be frank, I wasn’t very fit and I felt rather apprehensive. Well, I needn’t have worried...I had a ball. I may have been the back marker (stopping when necessary and rather out of breath) but I absolutely loved it. We were outside all day looking at wonderful countryside, riding through beautiful villages and even snooping into peoples back gardens as we swept down the road! I laughed out loud and got the giggles everytime I caught sight of
myself dressed head to toe in lycra.
We arrived at a lovely pub for lunch having biked 15 miles in the morning. We ordered a feast of a meal and we licked our plates clean without a shred of guilt. After another 10 miles, we arrived at a sweet hotel with enough time for a massage before supper, comfortable beds and sweet dreams. It really was like Swallows and Amazons for grownups.
Posted by
Rob Penn on Mon, Apr 16, 2012 @ 01:30 AM
Dai collects old racing bikes. I know this because he rides to my local pub for a lunchtime pint every Sunday on a different machine. Each week, one or another of the great marques of classic British, hand built, ‘lightweight’ bicycles – Hetchins, Hobbs, Holdsworth, Claud Butler, Rotrax and Mercian to name just a few – is leaning against the oak door.
Recently, I confronted Dai with a question: ‘How many bicycles do you own?’
‘Do you mean complete bicycles or just frames?’ he said, removing his glasses to clean them on his wool jersey.
‘Both.’
‘I’ve had a big sort out. I’ve sold some.’
‘Dai, you haven’t answered the question. How many?’
‘Well, there are a lot in the attic, and it’s been a time since I got to the very back up there and counted them.’
‘Dai!’
It wasn’t exactly Jeremy Paxman on Michael Howard, but I persisted. In the end Dai coughed the figure up. He owns 84 bicycle frames. Many of them are complete bikes.
We are a nation of collectors. You only have to get stuck in motorway traffic on a bank holiday Monday in May to appreciate the full extent of this national mania: half the population seems to be towing steam engines, vintage cars, dolls houses or crates of used comics to and from collectors’ conventions. We avidly collect anything from stamps, diecast models and punk band t-shirts to Toby jugs, watering cans, china thimbles, Scalextric and soap bars. In fact, there appears to be no end to the eccentric items we’re happy to fill our leisure time gathering into piles, apparently without purpose.
I did dabble briefly as a kid, with coins. But I’ve steadfastly refrained from collecting anything since. I do own nine bicycles, but it’s not a ‘collection’. It’s more of an accumulation. There’s no coherency or theme to the bikes. They all have a purpose: they all get ridden.
Dai and I have always tiptoed round each other, acknowledging the others passion for bicycles while recognising how polar our interests are. So he was just as dumbfounded as I was when one Sunday recently, a couple of pints down, I asked if he’d sell me a frame. And I was no less stunned than he was when he agreed.
A week later, Dai sent me a package. Enclosed was a note on the frame he’s selling me – one A.S. Gillott 1951 Continental, ‘originally commissioned and built for Ken Newholt of Sidmouth’. Also enclosed were several ‘frame colour pattern planners’ as Dai calls them – outline frames on blank paper for me to colour in, as an aid to choosing the colours the frame will eventually be painted – and details of the company that make the original ‘decals’ or frame transfers. Also, there was a map with instructions on how to find the specialist paint shop near my home, a page of ‘Instructions on gear calculations’ and, significantly if you’re a proper collector, a long, handwritten inventory of ‘proposed equipment’ – parts that will help me build the bike up into an authentic retro machine. Finally, there was a list of bike jumble sales where I might acquire them.
Since the package arrived, I’ve joined the V-CC, the Veteran Cycle Club. I’ve filled in the colour planners and chosen the frame colours. The frame is stripped of paint and rust protected, and I’m preparing for my first jumble sale.
‘What on earth am I doing?’ I keep wondering. Maybe I’m sliding into the grey underbelly of cycling before my time. Or maybe I’m gently entering the next of the seven ages of being a cyclist. Either way, if you see me at a jumble sale haggling over the price of a Campagnolo Gran Sport rear mech, please don’t laugh too hard, and certainly don’t bid against me.
Posted by
Rob Penn on Tue, Apr 10, 2012 @ 01:30 AM
A decade ago, I was lying in a hedge halfway up a hill in the Pennines when an old gent rolled off his bike and collapsed next to me. Sharing his thermos of tea, he told me many two-wheel tales from a lifetime of cycling. One, in particular, stuck in my mind. He recalled a club ride in the early fifties, from Derby to Shrewsbury and back – some 120 miles – at night. His eyes flamed with the vigour of youth, describing the peloton ‘putting the hammer down’, riding into the dawn.
I dreamed of doing a night ride like this, over the heather uplands and valleys of Mid-Wales. For years, it remained a dream. Then I mentioned it to my friend, Ade, a director of Howies. ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘When shall we do it?’
Howies are based in Cardigan, on the Irish Sea. I live in Abergavenny, on the border with England. The route seemed obvious, and the kernel of an idea – to ride across Wales in a night – took form: 120 miles with 3,000m of climbing. We asked a few old riding buddies if they were game enough. Remarkably, some were. We invited a few new friends along too.
I ride a bike for many reasons, but perhaps the most powerful one at this stage of my life is to share the physical and emotional fellowship of riding with friends. Riding a bike fosters friendship. For me, there is a direct correlation between how close my individual friends and I are, and how many miles we’ve put in together. I’m not talking about commuting miles or easy Saturday morning miles. I’m talking about the hard miles, the miles where you’re hanging and sore, when you’re far from home and need help.
Sixteen of us turned our backs on the darkening sea and rode east out of Cardigan at 10pm. Our route was along the Teifi River, over the remote moorlands of the Cambrian Mountains and down the Wye Valley. The roads were riddled with pot-holes and sheets of gravel. There were barrier-less hairpin bends, dark valleys, forests and 25% climbs. There was faith in the peloton and a promise that no-one would get left behind in the wilderness.
They were hard miles. Some were slow, others were fast, but the spirit and determination in the pack ensured everyone bar one got to the end. Alex snapped his rear derailleur near the Devil’s Staircase and that was that. Dave did get taken down by a badger – it darted out under his front wheel – but he re-mounted.
The ride forged new friendships through adversity. Digging deep when you’ve got nothing left, finding resolve when you’re feeling sick and weary, knowing the end will come when you’re just desperate for it – sharing these experiences with others leaves a lasting bond.
We rode down the Wye Valley as the first light of day illuminated the trees in the mist. At the top of Gospel Pass (549m) in the Black Mountains the sun rose and we chased the dawn down the Llanthony Valley to Abergavenny.
It was a monumental ride. We rode across a country, in a night. Okay, it’s a small country but still, breakfast has have tasted so good.
A roundup of the ride in full can be read both here, and also here.
A short video of the ride will soon be available to watch online at www.howies.co.uk and www.bikecation.co.uk.
Posted by
Rob Penn on Wed, Mar 28, 2012 @ 04:23 AM
Walking through Bespoked Bristol, the UK’s Handmade Bicycle Show last Friday, I instantly realised how rash I’d been in agreeing to judge. Choosing a winner was going to be horrendously difficult.
There is a lot of energy in the UK frame building scene at the moment. It’s a dramatic turn around from the rather down at heel scene I encountered when I started researching my book It’s All About the Bike a few years ago. Donhou, Demon, Feather, Paulus Quiros, Shand – there seems to a new builder emerging from his garage every month. Collectively, they’re breathing vigour back into the more established marques like Rourke, Roberts, Enigma and Mercian.
The very best artisan frame builders have more in common with the craftsmen who make Patek Philippe watches, Monteleone guitars or Borelli shirts than with the mass manufacturers of bicycles who churn out carbon and aluminium frames from factories in the Far East. Not long ago, much of what we owned was alive with the skill, and even the idealism, of the people who made it – the blacksmith who forged our tools, the cobbler, the wood turner, the carpenter, the wheelwright, the seamstress and the tailor who made the clothes we wore. We retain possessions that are well made: over time, they grow in value to us, and enrich our lives when we use them.
Throughout the show in Bristol, I saw pride in workmanship, and a connection to the tradition of British craftsmanship that has set standards worldwide for a century and a half. The frame is the soul of the bicycle: seeing the design, artistry and care being poured into frames by these builders is a source of immense satisfaction to me. Still, that didn’t stop me sweating up trying to choose a winner.
In the end the awards went as follows:
Best of Show – Robin Mather
Best Road Bicycle – Ricky Feather for Rapha
Best Track Bicycle – Demon Frameworks
Best Off Road – Crisp Titanium
Best Touring/Randonneur – Roberts and Winter Bicycles (joint winner)
Best New Builder – Wilkinson Cycles
The Public Vote – Robin Mather, 2nd – Donhou Bicycles, 3rd – Ricky Feather
Posted by
Rob Penn on Mon, Mar 26, 2012 @ 03:11 AM
For as long as I can remember, people have been predicting a boom in electric bicycles. On the Continent, there has been an increase in sales in recent years and in China, 20 million electric bikes were sold in 2009.
In the UK, electric bikes have always had an image problem. Serious cyclists still sneer at them. Commuter cyclists roll their eyes when you ride by on one. Even leisure cyclists laugh. I last rode an electric bike – a monstrous sit-up-and-beg machine with over-sized tubing that weighed more than a Mini and handled like a tractor – a decade ago. I remember people openly exclaiming ‘Hey, cheat!’ as I whirred down the road.
The older I get though, the more appealing electric bikes become. It’s not that I can’t do the miles or climb the hills on a conventional bicycle any longer. It’s just that I’m weary of getting off a train, cycling across town to a meeting and walking in to someone’s office like an over-ripe tomato, in a lather of perspiration, looking like I’ve just emerged from the jungles of Papua New Guinea.
Spencer Ivy is a new electric bike manufacturer. They don’t actively market their bikes as the answer to urban armpit stains, but they lent me a bike and I thought I’d give it a try. The model I borrowed – a ‘Spencer’ – looks much like a well-built commuter bike, only there’s a lithium manganese battery behind the down tube. This battery shares the workload, when you turn it on. It doesn’t take over completely, and you don’t get to rest your legs and smoke a Cohiba as the cityscape slides by. You do have to keep pedalling. There is a torque sensor which calculates how you’re doing, and provides a little the ‘oomph’ accordingly.
With a range of 50 or so miles per charge, the Spencer has enough in the tank to cope with my erratic commuting. It would work perfectly well on one of our Bikecation rides. I rode the Spenser from my rural home in the Black Mountains to Abergavenny station, and took trains to Cardiff, Bristol, London and Manchester on different days. At 22.5kg, the bike is hefty. Carrying it up and down the stairs to cross platforms at several of the railway stations was an upper body workout I hadn’t anticipated. They’re not cheap either. When I was on it, though, it handled well, cutting deftly through the confusion of the city streets.
Would I buy one?
Not yet.
Posted by
Rob Penn on Fri, Mar 09, 2012 @ 07:35 AM
This is something I wrote for the Howies blog: it was first posted here.
It’s why I ride
I ride a bicycle for many reasons. Perhaps the most powerful reason at this stage of my life is to share the physical and emotional fellowship of riding with friends. Happily, all my best friends ride. I’m not saying that we can’t be friends if you don’t ride – that would be absurd – nor am I suggesting that I’m friends with everyone I’ve ever ridden with. It’s just that all my best friends do ride. That’s the way things have turned out.
When I reflect upon the friends I have now, though, I realise the link between cycling and friendship is more profound than I’d previously thought. I see there is a direct correlation between how close my friends and I are, and how many miles we’ve put in together. I’m not talking about commuting miles or Sunday morning miles. I’m talking about the hard miles, the miles where you’re hanging and sore and need help, the miles where you’re far from home, shit’s gone wrong and your mettle is being tested. These are the miles that really count. Adversity puts friendship on the line. When things go awry, we subconsciously confide in each other. This leaves a lasting bond.
Twenty-five years ago, Bill and I rode rigid steel mountain bikes from Kashgar in China to Chitral in Pakistan. It was hard yakka all the way. Our friendship was young as we set off: we’d come together for the adventure. When my cheap aluminium luggage rack fell apart deep in the Hindu Kush, Bill offered to strap one of my panniers to his back. I knew then our friendship had distance. When I got married a decade later, he was my best man.
I have as many examples of hard miles with folk I’ve subsequently come to trust as I have good friends, so when my Dad died suddenly last autumn, old riding buddies were the first people I called.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: ‘A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.’ I believe in this. It’s why I’m still riding the hard miles, and why I’m still making new friends. It’s why I’ve hooked up with Ade and Alex and the Howies team to organise a ride across Wales at night, in March. When I’m lost in a dark forest with a broken chain somewhere between Cardigan and Abergavenny, when the night seems dead, when hope is fading and the right road is gone, then new friendships will be forged.
Posted by
Rob Penn on Fri, Mar 02, 2012 @ 02:01 AM
When I worked as a lawyer in London in the early 1990s, I commuted by bicycle. I used to ride through Hyde Park every day and I knew most of the other bike commuters by Christian name, there were so few of us. There was an overt sense of cyclists versus motorists on the city streets then. The monthly Critical Mass rides were practically anarchist events. The heroin-chic couriers were the flag carriers of a transport underclass.
The bike shop I used in Central London was a favourite of the couriers. One Friday night, I dropped in after work, to pick up my mountain bike. I had sheared off one of the cranks. The mechanic wheeled the bike out of the workshop, past three couriers sitting on a bench sharing a can of Tennent’s Extra. The old crank, a lump of aluminium, was strapped to my handlebar with a round of tape.
‘What’s that for?’ I said, pointing at the old crank. I looked at the mechanic who looked at the couriers, who looked at the mechanic, who looked at me. Clearly I was supposed to know what it was for, even if I was standing there in a grey pin-stripe suit. After a long pause, the middle courier looked at me with wild eyes and said: ‘You… stick… it… through… the… windscreen… of… a… car!’
Cycling has come a long way since then. The Times ‘Cycle Safe’ campaign is just the latest illustration of cycling’s drift back towards the centre of public consciousness. For me, supporting the campaign is a no brainer. I still ride whenever I’m in a city – London, Bristol and Manchester most recently – and although I feel cycling has got safer since the early 90s, I sympathise with people who still think the dangers of cycling are unacceptable. I’m probably inured to them. Either way, much more needs to be done.
I wrote to my MP, urging him to back the campaign and attend the debate about cycling in Westminster Hall last week. He couldn’t make it. As the MP for Monmouthshire, I’m probably his sole constituent concerned about cycling safety in cities. He replied with a series of platitudes about the Government’s efforts to promote cycling. The reality is they’re doing to little, at a time when the rise in the number of cyclists insists they should be doing a great deal.
This year, when the sun warms up and our track stars start racking up gold medals at the Olympic Velodrome, there’s going to be another nationwide surge in the number of people taking to two wheels. British Cycling estimates there are 900,000 women who want to start cycling.
They’re the ones who, to begin with at least, need better and safer conditions for cycling in our cities. If the Government is slow to act on this, if nothing changes, if the hierarchy on our roads isn’t reordered, then there’ll be a new army of cycling women out there, waving around old aluminium cranks, before the summer is out.
Posted by
Rob Penn on Fri, Feb 10, 2012 @ 01:45 AM
A couple of times a week, I commute to my office on a mountain bike. The ride starts with a big climb, out of the Arw valley and on to the Deri, a raised spur of heather moorland that forms a buttress of Sugar Loaf, one of the better known hilltops in the Black Mountains. The descent into Abergavenny is fast – on a moorland path at first, then through a sessile oak wood and finally into town on a sunken lane.
A few months ago, I started listening to an ipod on this ride. On the climb, I zone out to a podcast – something suitable middle-aged like ‘From Our Own Correspondent’, the Guardian Books Podcast or ‘Desert Island Discs’. On the way down, I listen to music, which got me thinking recently about tracks about bicycles. With nothing better to do when I got to my office one day, I wrote down my list of eight ‘Desert Island Bicycle Tracks’.
- Jimmy Donley – ‘Rockin’ Bicycle’
- Mark Ronson – ‘The Bike Song’
- Queen – ‘Bicycle Race’
- Kraftwerk – ‘Tour de France’
- Yves Montand – ‘A’ Bicyclette’
- Mal Webb – ‘Bike’
- Tom Waits – ‘Broken Bicycles’
- Luka Bloom – ‘The Acoustic Motorbike’ (Okay, it’s not about a bicycle, but hang the truth – it’s a great song about two-wheels.)
Now then, what’s on your list?
Posted by
Rob Penn on Mon, Jan 30, 2012 @ 04:01 AM
An article in the Observer yesterday declared ‘Olympic Fever will make 2012 the year of the bike.’ It’s the sort of headline that delights keen cyclists. It lends a sense of validity to what we do. It enforces the idea that we might be at a turning point in the journey the bicycle is – very slowly – making back to the centre of pubic consciousness in Britain. It even hints that this might, finally, be the year we all get to ride a mass participation, non-competitive cyclocross event all over Jeremy Clarkson’s hairy chest.
The theme of the article, by the Observer’s retail correspondent, is that the Games will drive growth in bicycle sales at a time when life on the high street is hapless. I guess if you’re a retail correspondent surveying your bombed-out sector, you fall on one knee when you hear a good news story. However, it shouldn’t really be news. History repeats itself: the bicycle has regularly performed well in straitened economic times – during the Great Depression in the 1930s, through the Austerity Years after World War II, during the OPEC oil crisis in the US in the early 1970s are all examples when bicycle sales have bucked the economic trend.
As any honest cycling retailer knows, getting people to buy a bike is easy. Getting them to ride it is rather harder. The LSE report into the economics of cycling published last year reported that some 3.7m bicycles were sold in 2010, up 28% on 2009. How many of those are already gathering dust at the back of garages? According to the Department of Transport’s 2009 National Travel Survey, 42% of households own a bike, but only 57% of those machines are ever ridden.
The bold 2012 ambitions of the Sky Ride campaign – to get a million more people cycling regularly by next year – will be a better barometer than retail bike sales. I remember Jeff Mapes, American journalist and author of Pedalling Revolution, telling me he thought the turning point in Portland, Oregon was when, for the first time, everyone who drove knew someone who cycled. Drivers then see cyclists not as a general annoyance, but as individuals – their neighbour’s daughter, perhaps, or a nephew.
Will we reach that turning point in Britain this year? It’s unlikely to happen, even in London. Will 2012 really be the ‘Year of the bike’? Here in Wales, we’ll happily take the ‘Year of the Dragon’.