The Commute

I don’t know about you but, since the advent of covid and working from home, I have rarely used my car. 

This is helped by the fact I have 2 supermarkets and a high street within a 5 minute walk, a pretty good local bus service and a great city-bike scheme. Indeed the most use the car had in recent years was driving my bike to the starting point of a ride, making it both an expensive bike taxi and not very ecological mode of transport.

Whilst my rational self knew I didn’t really need a car I very much doubt I would have been brave or motivated enough to voluntarily give up the independence of my own vehicle. Or, if I had, it would have had little to do with being ecologically minded and mostly because yet another piece had dropped off my old rust bucket making it unusable.

On returning from our yearlong cycling adventure however it was a time for decisions…..buy a new car each, share one or go cold turkey with none?

Corrupting The Next Generation: Cycle Touring Kids.

If I were asked for a list of my key strengths, at no point ever, would the words “good with children” appear.

Interacting with adults, no problem, in fact the more dysfunctional the better. After a career spent in health and social care covering addictions and mental health, people in crises do not phase me whatsoever. Give me an adult in drug withdrawal or psychosis I can cope, hand me a small child to look after however and I literally go to pieces.

The Little Card: The big journey of a small act of kindness.

I  often wonder if we every truly appreciate the impact that our smallest gestures can have, touching people’s lives in ways we can never imagine.

It can be so easy to underestimate the power of small things, holding open a door for example, waving someone into the queue ahead of you, even a smile from a stranger on a bad day, all of these can lift my mood like the sun emerging from behind clouds.

However, there’s one stranger I met in Canada, fleetingly, over a decade ago, who has had a significant impact now on the lives of 4 people (and counting).

Transitioning: Back to Reality

It’s been 3 months now since we stopped cycling and nearly 2 months since landing back in the UK on a damp, grey June day.

The strangest thing though, how not strange it is being back home.

12 months of travelling, cycling around the world and, if it weren’t for the 2000+ photographs and fading cycle tans, I might be tempted to wonder if it was real at all?

How not to commit murder, and other lessons. 12 months of cycle touring.

Now we’ve finished cycle touring, one of the questions I get asked the most about the trip is “How was it?”

After nearly 12 months, 10 countries and 5000+ miles, how do you even begin to answer that without boring the pants off someone for hours?!