The web site
One of my earliest, and to be honest one of my very few memories of childhood, is of seemingly endless summers spent simply pedaling around the narrow lanes of the Kentish countryside on my bicycle. As I grew up I moved on to mopeds, then motorbikes and of course cars, and I forgot the pure joy of those long summer days.
Although I started cycling again when I went to University, the demands of full time employment (and most especially having to wear a suit) pushed cycling back into the closet.
Eventually, though, over a long, grey, miserable winter spent performing a particularly mindless task in an especially dull office, I decided enough was enough. Life had to have more to it than this, and in looking for that elusive element that felt like it might give me more, I was drawn back to those early days on two wheels. Freedom, travel, fresh air and exercise - it seemed like the perfect combination. I quit my job, bought a new bicycle, and headed for Patagonia.
Since then I have spent half (well, I hope only ha lf..) a lifetime balancing work, travel and cycling, with trips across Europe, the US and Japan. These trips became so important to me, that I tried to write down some of the experiences they brought me, partly to capture them, so that I could look back on them and re-live the experience in later years, partly just to formulate in my own mind what exactly was happening at the time.
These stories (and others) are laid out here, first and foremost in the hope that you might find them entertaining, but also in the very sincere hope that if any of you out there are contemplating a similar sort of escape, that I can help or encourage you to make the decision.