Cycling Travel

In 1921, Britain’s most illustrious highway, the Great North Road, ceased to exist - on paper at least. From London to Edinburgh, the old road was largely replaced by the A1 as the era of the motor car took hold. A hundred years later, journalist and cyclist Steve Silk embraces the anniversary as the perfect excuse to set off on an adventure. Travelling by bike at14 miles per hour, he heads north, searching out milestones and memories. Seen from a saddle rather than a car seat, the towns and the countryside of England and Scotland reveal traces of Britain’s past and future.

What does it take to be one of the world's best high-altitude mountain climbers? A lot of fundraising; traveling in some of the world's most dangerous countries; enduring cold bivouacs, searing lungs, and a cloudy mind when you can least afford one. It means learning the hard lessons the mountains teach. Steve House built his reputation on ascents throughout the Alps, Canada, Alaska, the Karakoram, and the Himalaya that have expanded possibilities of style, speed, and difficulty.

At age 22, Charlie Walker left home in search of adventure. Fleeing the boredom that comes with comfort, he set off on a secondhand bicycle. The aim was simple: to pedal to the furthest point in each of Europe, Asia, and Africa. He didn’t train or plan. He just started. The journey was an escape from an unremarkable existence, a pursuit of hardship, and a chance to shed the complacency of middle England. From the brutality of winter on the Tibetan plateau, to the claustrophobia of the Southeast Asian jungle, the quest provided Charlie with ample opportunity to test his mettle.

A London cycle courier with a taste for adventure, Emily Chappell entered an extraordinary new race - The Transcontinental - in which riders must find their own way, entirely unassisted, across Europe in the shortest time possible. On her second attempt, she won the women's event, covering nearly 4,000 miles in 13 days and 10 hours, sleeping in short bursts wherever exhaustion took her.

Disillusioned with corporate London life and with no previous experience as a long-distance cyclist, Anna decides to clamber atop a beautiful pink bicycle (named Boudica) and set out on an 11,000-mile journey on her own, through each and every state of the USA. Dodging floods, blizzards and electrical storms, she pedals side by side with mustangs of the Wild West, through towering redwood forests, past the snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains and on to the volcanos of Hawaii.

I Should Have Left the Whiskey is the first book in the Rambling On trilogy–compelling tales from a time when motorcycles were left in the shed and global exploration slowed to the pace of cycling. These diaries divulge two very different journeys in Asia: because progressing into enlightened India required some back-pedalling through darkest Thailand en route to China.

If you want to know more about bike tours, but you are not ready to go on your own bike touring experience yet, then this book will answer a couple of questions you may have, and, hopefully, it will also show you the way to have a successful bike tour. This guide focuses on everything you need to know about bike touring, but it also gives you information about the things you must do before, during, and after a bike tour.

Why take the shortest, most direct route through life, when you could choose the wiggliest, most mountainous one possible? Armed with a limited grasp of Spanish and determined to meet as many Lamas as possible, Anna and her friend Faye set off on a six-month journey along the spine of the largest mountain range in the world - the Andes. Beginning in the bustling city of La Paz, the duo pedal south - through dense jungle, across pristine white salt flats and past towering volcanoes, following the path of thundering glacial rivers to the snow-tipped peaks of Patagonia.

The plan is simple. George and Ben have three weeks to cycle 1000 miles from the bottom of England to the top of Scotland. There's just one small problem - they have no bikes, no clothes, no food, and no money. Setting off in just a pair of Union Jack boxer shorts, they attempt to rely on the generosity of the British public for everything from food to accommodation, clothes to shoes, and bikes to beer.

In 1935, Fred A. Birchmore left the small American town of Athens, Georgia, to continue his college studies in Europe. In his spare time, Birchmore toured the continent on a one-speed bike he called Bucephalus (after the name of Alexander the Great's horse). A born wanderer, Birchmore broadened his travels to include the British Isles and even the Mediterranean. After a lengthy, unplanned detour in Egypt, Birchmore put his studies on hold, pointed Bucephalus eastward, and just kept going.

As Ellie’s 50th birthday approaches and her ambitions of a steady income, a successful career and an ascent of Everest seem as far away as ever, she begins to doubt she’s capable of achieving anything at all. So when her best friend Mick suggests a gruelling cycle ride from Land’s End to John o’Groats, she takes up the challenge. They opt for the scenic route which takes them along cycle paths, towpaths and the back roads and byways of Britain, unable to resist sampling beers in the pubs they pass along the way.

Biking from Oregon to Maine is no small feat, especially for two newly retired women who carry everything they need for three months, powered only by the strength of their legs and a desire for adventure. Alice Honeywell and Bobbi Montgomery invite listeners to follow their ride by bicycle across the United States, as they face scorching sun, driving rain, buffeting winds, equipment failures, killer hills, wild fires, and even a plague of grasshoppers.

Committed Belgophile and road cycling obsessive Harry Pearson takes you on a journey across Flanders - through the lumpy horizontal rain, up the elbow-juddering cobbled inclines, past the fans dressed as chickens and the shop window displays of constipation medicines as he follows races big, small and even smaller, through one glorious, muddy spring. Ranging over 500 years of Flemish and European history, Pearson examines the characters, the myths and the rivalries that make Flanders a place where cycling is a religion and the riders its Lycra-clad priests.

The Tour of Flanders is Belgium's most brutal day in the saddle. The bike-crazed Flemish don't just send riders over cobblestone roads. Nor are they content to break the racers' legs with nearly 20 steep hills. No, the worst of all cycling worlds meet in Flanders with narrow, vertical roads paved with slippery, dangerous cobbles. The hills are so steep they are called "muurs", or walls, and they come one after another, for hours, until the riders are shattered with exhaustion. The Tour of Flanders is so fiendishly difficult that the man who wins it earns everlasting fame.

Ishbel Rose Holmes was adrift and alone when she set out to bicycle across the world. She was pedaling across Turkey when a street dog, Lucy, crossed her path and changed her life forever. Ishbel did not want anything or anyone to slow her down, but when she witnessed Lucy attacked by other dogs, Ishbel rescued her - forming a deep bond between the pair. Ishbel recognized her own vulnerability in her new canine friend and launched a heartfelt mission to find Lucy a home and give her a happy life.

In this, the 2nd Audio book of the Rambling On trilogy, the load gets lighter and the speed slower, but Graham Field’s objective remains the same: he is fully focused on making the route to his demise as pleasurable as possible. And so the quest to his Chinese destiny begins. Now relieved of the whiskey, the road nevertheless continues to be an uphill struggle, not helped by the sub-zero winter temperatures. But being towed behind trucks and loaded on to buses evens out the ratio of endurance and pleasure.

Part sporting travelogue, part political history, (Just as Well) It's Not About the Bike follows journalist Chris Atkin's 1,300 km cycle from Valencia to Gibraltar. En route, he travels through Spain’s most picturesque towns. And Benidorm. Along the way, he learns about the region’s history, from the time four hydrogen bombs fell over Spain to the politician who shot General Franco’s daughter in the bottom yet rose to become one of the country’s most powerful men. While riding across Spain, Chris also meets an array of eccentric characters.

"You'll never make it!" With encouragement like that, author Mickey Thomas, in a fit of youthful testosterone, and with meticulous inattention to detail, decided to embark on a once-in-a lifetime 3,400-mile bicycle trek from Montana to Alaska. While riding through knee problems, illness, homesickness, infatuation, bad weather, and meeting a host of quirky and hilarious characters, Mickey, and his group rides over some of the roughest roads and most desolate scenery in North America. Along the way, he discovers an inner strength as well as a new physical stamina he never had.

Despite never having learned to ride a bike, Jackie Winter has pedalled over 100,000 miles - on the back of a tandem. For almost 40 years, Jackie and her husband Allan have enjoyed cycling in Dorset and Jackie describes many favorite bike rides. Life in Tandem recounts travellers' tales gleaned from a lifetime of cycle touring holidays in the UK. The couple love cycling in the Yorkshire Dales, which is where they headed in 1976, the year of the drought. A few years later, a cycling holiday in the Lake District presented a whole new set of challenges.

In November 2015 Sarah Outen completed her five-year, 25,000 mile journey looping the planet by cycling across Europe, Asia and North America and canoeing and kayaking across the North Pacific and most of the North Atlantic.