They say you should never meet your heroes. Well, the Cairngorms have always held a heroic place in my mind. I’d never been there, barely even seen many photographs. I just had the impression that it was wild. It was a place where the foolish could come unstuck and the hardy could find beauty and . . . → Read More: The Cairngorms Loop
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As I’ve been working away on the route for EWE, the software that has made it possible has been RouteBuddy. I’ve always resisted buying any mapping software as you can get quite far with free online tools and there is limited choice for Mac users. But EWE was too big a project: I needed to . . . → Read More: RouteBuddy Overall, I’ve been really happy with my Dakota. It’s seen me through many (many!) miles of riding and not once let me down. A couple of times, it did eject on rough ground but I was lucky enough to find it quite quickly on each occasion. Given that a GPS is pretty important to various . . . → Read More: How to fix a Garmin Dakota bike mount [singlepic id=170 w=480 h=640 float=] The ice lid from my clothes washing bucket It’s very much “that time of year”. The time when every part of my bike decides to break within the space of a few weeks. The time when many trails are so muddy that there’s a severe shortage of Type 1 fun, . . . → Read More: There’s little glory in bucket-washing Someone asked me this by email. Here’s what I said: If you’re thinking of trying to pick which towns to sleep in, that is probably a bad idea. You’ll be off-plan pretty soon, so you might as well wing it the whole way. In general, it’s much quicker to sleep out than to get a . . . → Read More: Where To Sleep on The Tour Divide [singlepic id=168 w=320 h=240 float=left] [singlepic id=169 w=320 h=240 float=right] I never thought that I’d be regularly riding a rigid-forked mountain bike. In 2010, my Rockshox Revelations were approaching useless as I was approaching the Tour Divide. I’d already decided that rigid made sense for the race: less weight, less to go wrong. So, I . . . → Read More: A Tale Of Two Forks I had a really nice ride at Swinley this morning. Conditions are still pretty good despite some recent rain – especially on the man-made trails. And while I was there, I ran into some of the trail pixies working on The Stickler. It was great to be able to thank them for their work and . . . → Read More: Swinley Trail Pixies 2012 was going to be a quiet year. No spending lots of money on flying to races in far-flung places. No spending months on a bike instead of working. It hasn’t quite worked out like that. I’ve managed to keep the aeroplane time down, but there were too many interesting challenges around to resist them . . . → Read More: 2012 I have recently been appreciating good side of living on The Thames. I get out on it in a kayak or canoe pretty regularly, I run along it, I laugh when the bus announces the stop near my house as “The Thames Riviera”. So it seemed like an appropriate way for Emily and I to . . . → Read More: New Year’s Eve Canoe Trip So, Helen Skelton is going to “become the first person to use a bicycle to help her reach the South Pole”. A few exaggerated claims in this BBC article are causing some annoyance on the internet. It claims that in the 500 miles trip she will “hope to set a new world record for the . . . → Read More: Celebrity Adventure |
