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A Reminder
For one reason or another I’ve not ridden much in Sussex this year. There have been trips overseas, to mountainous lands, stage races and iconic summits, tours and audaxes, foreign counties, long long rides to way over there and then back again. Some of these were planned long ago and some impromptu and immediate desires…
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You Are Here
You are here. Yeah I know, the little animated arrow following the blue line on the screen tells me that much, but not a lot more. It’s zeroes and ones, information without knowledge. Satellites pinpointing my coordinates, nothing more. It’ll get me from A to B but won’t tell me anything about the journey. GPS…
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Here to There to Here
“Spoke to Andrew at TiC who wants to know when we’re going up to say hello?” Within a few minutes we’ve planned to ride to Cambridge and back in a weekend. Two hundred and twenty odd kilometres each way. The idea to enter the 2017 Transcontinental race as a team means it doesn’t take much…
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Bunking Off (Reprise)
One last continental fling before the clocks change, a ride half done before daylight. Guiding the girl on her way to Paris from Oxford to the Avenue Verte by the lakes. As our routes part company we wish her luck and disappear into the valley, into the silence of the darkness. Stopping, we search for…
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Three is the Magic Number
A while back my friend Ollie from work said he wanted to ride up Mont Ventoux for his fortieth birthday. I mentioned that my friends Jo, George and Oli had, a couple of years before, ridden all three road ascents and joined something called Le Club Des Cingles Du Mont Ventoux. I pointed him in…
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Cogidubnus Cheese and Cake Double Century
“Please take a banana. I hate them.” I chase wheels through the southwest fringes of London, from Richmond station over the Thames, out through Bushy Park and over the Thames again by Hampton Court Palace and then through leafy suburbia. I know that I am riding a bit harder than I want to be and…
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Alpine Weekender
Thursday “Not here, you need to be at the North Terminal”. I really should have checked my boarding pass before I joined the huge queue to drop off my bike bag. Thirty minutes later I’ve dropped my bag at the right terminal and find my way to the departure gate for Geneva. A few hours after…
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Restless
An overwhelming desire to be somewhere else. The overnight ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe. 130 kilometre potter around a corner of Normandy. Lunch and a nap on a beach. The evening ferry back to Sussex. Stopping off on the way home (avec vin, formage et saucisse) to meet friends in Hidden Valley. Waking up on the side…
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