Bike Hippies The adventures of two UK cyclists on a bike and a trike Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 10 0 72 3907

Articles from Bike Hippies

Monday September 24th - Bucketloads 2007-11-03 08:44:00 Maps are dangerous. They're small and flat and interesting, just perfect for seducing you into long and crazy bike tours. During our little trip to Devon, I was reminded of the reality of travelling such distances, and started to wonder just what the hell I was doing trying to cycle from one end of France to the other. Well, the first day of that trip wasn't exactly easy.The ferry tipped us out at 6:30am local time into a dark, mild and windy Cherbourg morning. I'd only had a couple of hours sleep, not too much of a problem since I was excited to get going and was confident of making it up the next night. At least it wasn't raining...Hungry, I stopped at the first boulangerie I saw, but unfortunately had forgotten to get any change and the lady wouldn't let me break my 50euro note on two pain au chocolats. Bah! Any patissier worth their sugar would have a heart and donate a pain au chocolat to a tired-looking windswept cyclist...The great start continued when it began to rain. Ser ...

Sunday September 23rd - drizzlesome 2007-11-02 06:33:00 It started to rain almost as soon as I was out of the front gate.Not proper rain, just fine misty drizzly rain that barely even counts but makes things damp and is rather annoying all the same. I managed without a raincoat for several miles until it picked up a little, and continued in the same vein all afternoon. This meant that, despite the loveliness of the Dorset countryside, I wasn't able to see much of it, and the camera stayed warm and dry inside.The route was mostly flat for the first few miles, then I hit a small steep hill at Hartgrove, followed by a long steep climb up onto Cranborne Chase at Fontnell Magna. After that, I followed the river Tarrant and then then the Stour downstream, so it was a nice long gradual downhill all the way to the sea.The roads were quiet country lanes until Wimborne, where there was no choice other than to take bigger roads, so I started out on the B341 to Poole. As soon as I entered Poole Borough, I was swept off into an offroad cycle path, with ...

Sunday September 14th - mini moos 2007-11-01 03:56:00 The campsite was just off the A30 and we live just off the A30. What better way to spend a Sunday than on a nice straight road home with no navigational worries and the sweet breeze from a speeding car whooshing past your elbow every couple of seconds... well, it made sense in dgym's head anyway. I managed to talk him out of taking the main road all the way home and we just did a section of it, but that was bad enough, roads like that are no fun and my legs weren't at all happy with me by the time we got onto the little roads again. The way back was quite hard work, we seemed to end up choosing the hilly route nearly all the way back - the hills weren't quite enough to be marked with arrows on our map, and we ended up wishing for a nice OS contour map! It was just before Lillington that we found what must be the teensiest tiniest little cows in the world. We weren't sure they were real at first, as we didn't know you could get cows that little but then they started munching on gra ...

Saturday September 13th - we slacked off 2007-10-31 07:31:00 The screaming seagulls woke me up in time for sunrise on Thursday morning and I had a bit of a wander down to the beautiful sandstone cliffs on the campsite's private beach.We were quite tired and the site was well equipped and not too expensive so we decided to stay on a bit and give ourselves a chance to actually be on holiday. Ice creams were eaten, beaches were walked upon and legs were allowed to recover a little. We had a pleasant stay at Ladram Bay, despite being kept awake on the second night by a couple having a screaming unintelligible row in which the bloke kept threatening to leave, stomped off but never lived up to his promise and came back for another round when he realised he couldn't really get very far on foot.We left early-ish (9am) on Saturday morning, Dgym being up at an unusually early hour, rolled down the hill and followed the river Otter as far as Ottery St. Mary. The valley was lovely and gently rolling, lots of pleasant ups and downs, and the sun wasn't t ...

Wednesday September 12th - big hills 2007-10-30 09:11:00 There were no toilets on the campsite so first thing on Wednesday, dgym went into town to use the public toilets, leaving me to cook breakfast and start packing up, whilst fending off a dozen hungry inquisitive chickens. I don't think he was too impressed upon his return to find one bird perched on the seat of his trike, and to learn that another had found its way into the tent while my back was turned (He didn't seem at all consoled that I had skilfully managed to extract the chicken from the tent, which is considerably harder than getting it in there in the first place)The big climb of the day was coming out of Southleigh, or so we thought. We stopped a short way up the hill to eat some lunch, as we'd taken our time in leaving and had both got hungry again. We fuelled ourselves for the climb ahead with bread, cheese and olives. The hill was tough, we had to stop to recover ever few metres, but at least it was a nice quiet shady road.At the top, we passed Blackbury Castle. We're ...

Tuesday September 11th - herding chickens 2007-10-29 07:05:00 On the second day I was up at 7:30 and there was no hope of seeing dgym for some time yet so I set about getting the stove set up for our porridge, and foraging for blackberries. Dgym emerged two hours later, still tired from his disturbed sleep.Blackberries and porridge are a lovely combination, or so I thought, dgym decided he wasn't so keen on porridge after all so started considering alternative breakfast solutions.Tuesday was not kind on the legs, and we only ended up riding 15 miles. The few miles to Whitchurch Canonicorum were OK but then were faced with our first arrowed climb (the designation on our map for steep gradients) followed by a similar descent to Wooton Fitzpaine, where we were delighted to find dozens of swallows waiting for us on the overhead phone lines. Having recently become rather fond of swallows after moving in next door to a nestful of them, we were quite pleased to see this.A longer and more difficult climb stood between us and Monkton Wyld Cross. At the t ...

Monday September 10th - a late start 2007-10-28 06:22:00 The trip to Devon started out with Dgym wandering around looking for his thermal layers and refusing to leave without them (despite the fact that we were supposed to have left yesterday and he hadn't seen said thermals since skiing in April) and me getting very frustrated and desperate to get cycling. Not a great beginning.It was mid-day before we were ready, solar panels fitted, panniers packed, bikes tuned up and ready to go. By this time, my breakfast porridge had worn off so we stopped a few miles down the road for a pub lunch.Our ride started out nice and relatively flat, such is most of North Dorset. We opted for the smallest roads on the map - tiny, unclassified single track lanes. Our choice paid off well and we encountered very few cars on our journey. The roads were tiny and shady, perfect for warm September cycling.The flats didn't last. South Dorset is beautiful but very hilly. The gradients started to get more "rolling" after Leigh, and by the time we reached Beaminster ...

Off 2007-09-07 13:09:00 We're off for some more adventures.We are riding west for a two week tour. We're aiming for Cornwall with our camping gear and the intention of actually camping and cooking for ourselves this time.After that, I'm leaving dgym at home and heading off on a long ride to Corsica.Right now we're in a bit of a last minute panic getting everything ready. I managed to break one of the screws attaching my front rack to my bike, it's never pretty when a rack breaks on tour so I'm glad I discovered the problem before leaving. After a quick trip to the bike shop, my bike is happy again.We're trying to decide what goes best in a camping kitchen without weighing ourselves down too much. I have been making little bags of herbs and spices, a little squeezy bottle of olive oil, and a little pot of sugar to sprinkle on porridge.There won't be much blogging while we're travelling this time, due to limited supplies of electricity. Instead, we will be using what is known as "pen and paper" to writ ...

Une Housse 2007-09-06 04:23:00 Later this month, after dgym and I have spent a couple of weeks biking around Cornwall and re-building our hill muscles, I will be starting out on a ride to Corsica. This will take me down through Dorset to Poole ferry port, across the sea to Cherbourg and down through France to Marseille, from which I will take the ferry to Corsica. However, I am due in Normandy at the end of October for a family holiday so will be needing to travel back up the length of France at a rate which my poor little legs cannot possibly achieve. This means I will be travelling from Marseille to Paris on the lovely speedy TGV, and then taking a further train up into Normandy.It is well documented on sites such as Bike Access that, whereas France's roads are among the most bike-friendly in the world, its railway system is the exact opposite and the best way to get around this is to partially disassemble the bike, bag it up in an housse and treat it as luggage. Unfortunately, commercially-sold bike bags tend to ...

Solar Power 2007-09-05 06:18:00 On our next trip down to Cornwall we will be trying to save a bit of money by camping and doing our own cooking. One of the downsides of this is that we probably won't have a ready supply of electricity to recharge anything. Since there are quite a few things I would like to be able to recharge I decided to do some research and see what might be practical.The first priority was a phone charger because I want to be able to speak to Hel while she is traveling France on her own. She bought a wind up charger just in case but it is quite noisy, heavy and very tedious. Most phones, ours included, need 5 volts to charge. Because my Zaurus (cross between a PDA and a laptop) also needs 5V so this setup would keep me programming on our travels too.There are several commercially available solar chargers, such as the Solio or Freeloader that would do the trick. I bought a Solio a while back and was very disappointed as it came with a voucher for a free charging tip which not only took several mon ...

Five Wheels 2007-08-27 12:38:00 For our tour last year, we chose to ride two very different machines.Dgym's trikeDgym bought his Ice QNT recumbent trike especially for the occasion. He wanted something more comfortable than an upright bike and, already owning a recumbent bike and not being quite happy with it, decided to add a wheel for stability (i.e. the ability to stop and have a rest when going up long hills). The largest chainring has been replaced with a larger one to compensate for the small wheels, giving us both a similar gear range, and all three of the tyres have been replaced as the original ones were a bit flimsy.Hel's bikeDawes Galaxy, which I've had for a few years, and has received various improvements, for example a homebuilt front wheel around the legendary SON hub dynamo which powers a Lumotec Oval front light (non-LED version), an extra-strong hand-built back wheel, and various other bits such as PD-M324 pedals and Body Geometry bar tape for extra comfort.ComparisonA nice seatWe both had moment ...

Eight Great Sites for Touring Cyclists 2007-08-21 07:53:00 Warm ShowersThis site's made my day - the Warm Showers concept has been around since the early nineties but has only recently become a fully mappified website.If only we'd known about it sooner. When you sign up, you are joining a network of people who offer accommodation facilities to touring cyclists. You can choose what you offer, from a camping spot on the lawn to full B&B service, and dictate your own terms. In return, you get access to everybody else on the network for accommodation when you're touring, and the hopeful excitement that maybe somebody will take you up on your offer.The idea of letting a stranger into your home might make some people a bit uneasy - I think people are quite wary about doing so, and there are some good reasons out there, but those good reasons are few and far between and being afraid of them is really not very constructive. While travelling last year we were often helped by kind strangers who helped us find somewhere to stay or somewhere to eat, or ...

A cup of Trangia Tea 2007-08-20 04:55:00 The Trangia 27-1 UL stove arrived last Wednesday in a little brown parcel and it was all very exciting. Unfortunately in all the excitement I had neglected to get excited enough to actually buy any fuel for it, so wasn't able to test it straight away and had to content myself with merely unpacking it, working out what was what, and gazing admiringly at how neatly all the bits and pieces nested together. On Thursday I picked up a good supply of pretty purple juice from the hardware shop and on Friday, a rather bleak and drizzly looking day (hey, this is the summer of grey miserable days, don't you know?), I put on my raincoat, armed myself with one Trangia stove + accessories, one plastic camping mug, one Spork (for stirring), one teabag, a small bottle of meths, a bottle of water, a cigarette lighter and set off into the deepest darkest depths of The Garden to boil up a cup of Trangia Tea.Bits & PiecesThe Trangia comes in several parts:Burner unitThe burner (centre) is the core of th ...

Equipment: Camping 2007-08-15 16:20:00 There will be more cycling in a couple of weeks time. Dgym and I are going for a couple of weeks in Cornwall (the home of his trike) and I'm then off for a couple more weeks Somewhere Else (Which at the moment could be anywhere from Scandinavia to Central Europe - as usual I have too many ideas and can't just pick one of them!). I'm looking forward to getting Dgym back on the road, he seems a bit under-enthusiastic and hasn't been paying his trike enough attention lately, but hopefully he'll get over that.In the meantime, we've been thinking a bit about the equipment we took along with us last year, how that worked out for us and what we learned for next time, and thought it'd be useful to write a bit about that. We'll start with camping.TentThe small free-standing tent was borrowed, and we regarded it as an item of "emergency equipment", to be used in case we couldn't find anywhere to stay. I was up for camping but Dgym, who was several inches too tall to fit in comfortably, ...

Cerne Abbas 2007-07-11 18:21:00 It's been a while, but we've been busy with all kinds of non-cycling activities, most of which involved searching for somewhere nice to live, and then moving there. After several months living in the flat beneath a herd of tone deaf karaoke-loving elephants, we finally found it. For all our travels, we've ended up in England - Dorset to be precise.It's a lovely house, a quiet semi-detached farm cottage with lovely views over the surrounding farmland. It backs onto wheat fields and is frequently visited by pheasants, hares and all kinds of birds. There's a pair of swallows nesting in the neighbour's eaves who seem to be constantly flying back and forth and are rather lovely. We're only renting but are clinging to the hope that through a combination of hard work, luck and/or economics, one day we might be able to afford to buy a house this nice.The past few months have been shamefully uneventful on the cycling front, mostly due to our living in a busy area of Guildford, where the ...