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Emergency Gift: Ride Earth 2011 Photo Calendars

By Tom | Published: December 9, 2010

It’s that time of year again — just when you decided (again) that you’d never think of any­thing ori­ginal to give to your gran/mum/boyfriend/postman this Christ­mas and were about to go out and buy brandy/chocolates/aftershave/12 red roses, here I am with a truly beau­ti­ful, ori­ginal, and prac­tical gift — a 2011 photo calendar!

These are avail­able to mail-order in the UK through Snapfish.co.uk. Nor­mally you’d pay £14.99 per cal­en­dar, but by sneak­ily enter­ing the pro­mo­tional code ‘33CAL’ at the check­out, you’ll get a whop­ping 33% discount.

Visit Snap­fish to cus­tom­ise and order your cal­en­dars now. Don’t for­get the dis­count voucher code! Read More »

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How To Keep An Irish Cyclist Happy At Christmas Time

By Tom | Published: December 1, 2010

As any cycle-tourist will tell you, feed­ing a cycle tour­ist is no easy task. The demands of a stom­ach that pro­cesses a min­imum of 5,000 cal­or­ies per day must not be under­es­tim­ated — indeed, such needs can often be a source of great embarass­ment for the hungry cyc­list when invited in at the end of the day and presen­ted with a por­tion sized for a mere mortal.

Masters of campcraft

Last Christ­mas I was stay­ing in Yerevan, Armenia, and I had the pleas­ure of host­ing two very hungry cyc­lists — Fear­ghal and Simon of Revolu­tion Cycle, the jour­ney which they tri­umphantly and hero­ic­ally com­pleted earlier this year. The lads were expect­ing the full tra­di­tional Christ­mas spread — as well they should, after detour­ing so many hun­dreds of kilo­metres through the snowy moun­tains on the sole prom­ise of mince-pies — and it was clear that this would be a truly for­mid­able chal­lenge. Read More »

Posted in Off The Bike, Random Musings | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Helping You Get Your Bike Trip Off The Ground

By Tom | Published: November 17, 2010

I took part in the Royal Geo­graph­ical Society’s ‘Explore’ con­ven­tion last week­end, for the second time in the last four years. The first time I did so, I was a wide-eyed new­comer to the world of exped­i­tions, and I remem­ber quite power­fully the real­isa­tion that, rel­at­ive to the assembled speak­ers and del­eg­ates, mine ranked fairly low in the list of nutty exped­i­tion plans.

St Peter's Basilica from the floor

Read More »

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Want To Plan An Expedition?

By Tom | Published: November 9, 2010

For the bud­ding adven­tur­ers out there — two wheeled or oth­er­wise — you’d do a lot worse than to come along to the Explore sem­inar at the Royal Geo­graph­ical Soci­ety in London.

Progress downriver

It lasts the whole week­end, begin­ning with an open­ing lec­ture on the Fri­day night, with lec­tures and work­shops through­out Sat­urday and Sunday. Of par­tic­u­lar interest to cyc­lists will be the bicycle exped­i­tion logist­ics sem­inar. Both Andy and myself will be on the panel this year. It’ll be a great oppor­tun­ity for us to put our com­bined exper­i­ence to good use by impart­ing to new­comers whatever advice we’re able to dish out.

Four years ago we were in the audi­ence at the same sem­inar, and more than any­thing else the reas­sur­ance that we were not alone in our mad­ness was a great help dur­ing our own plan­ning and pre­par­a­tion phase.

Read more and find out how to book a place. See you there!

Posted in Practical Advice | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Everybody Loves A Happy Ending

By Tom | Published: November 4, 2010

I rode into my small vil­lage in the East Mid­lands, one thou­sand two hun­dred and twenty-two days after cyc­ling out of it, whoop­ing with the recog­ni­tion of every stick and stone, fol­low­ing Tenny on her bicycle past the park gates, round the tight bend which it was always so easy to over­shoot, down the leafy hill on which my brother went over the handle­bars of his BMX aged 8, past the first houses and the spring­wa­ter trick­ling from the wall and the dingy old pub I never went to and round the bend to the third house on the left, which a long time ago I used to call home. Read More »

Posted in Expedition Log | Tagged , , , , , , | 22 Comments