Bike2Oz tells the story of Kevin Doye, a train worker, and Lowanna King, a school teacher, who chose to pedal to Australia rather than fly to highlight the damage created by aviation to the climate.
The couple filmed their 18-month adventure across the UK, Europe, Pakistan, India, Iran, Singapore and Australia.
A four-page article on our 2007 family cycle camping holiday to the Netherlands has been published in the April edition of Cycling Plus magazine.
When I get the time - and my dad, who sells the adverts on BritishCycling.org.uk, has booked in an ‘end of part one’ video advert - I’ll be creating a YouTube and Apple TV featurette on this trip. I got lots of footage of ‘normal’ people on bikes. That wasn’t us, we were in Lycra and wore helmets.
It was fab for the Reidlets to travel in a country that really looked after its cyclists.
We saw this great looking bionic leg in a campsite near Amsterdam, but never bumped into the owner so couldn’t ask him how long it took to recharge and whether it had a pedalling action:
The trip was pretty green. We cycled eight miles from our home in Newcastle to the DFDS ferry at North Shields and landed near Amsterdam the next day. No flights, no car trips.
Our next bike holiday is to Scotland in May, pre-midgies. We’ll be taking the train. I hope our kids grow up to realise you don’t need an SUV to get to fun places. The best ‘people carrier’ is the one with two wheels, fuelled by breakfast.
The China Post reports that the Taiwan Railway Administration yesterday began operating its “environmental protection train service,” with a group of 272 cycling enthusiasts taking their bikes on special trains.
The service is on a three-month trial and takes over whole trains. Cyclists register as “passenger groups” to book the exclusive-to-cyclists trains.
The bikes go in their own carriages, reminiscent of UK group rides in the 1950s. The CTC organised ‘Cyclists’ Specials, as seen in this fascinating video:
Kevin Doye and Lowanna King have produced a spectacularly good video series on their bike tour from Oxford to Australia.
Here’s a YouTube teaser:
The rest of the series can be subscribed to on Undercurrents.
The couple didn’t travel with a film crew. All the two-person shots were done with the help of a tripod, hence a claim that the couple cycled much of the route twice.
The video series is being released in thirteen weekly installments and features footage of the couple cycling from the UK, through Europe and on to Pakistan, India, Iran, Singapore and Australia. The couple got married when they reached Sydney.
Paul O’Connor of Undercurrents said:
“Bike2Oz is a very inspiring series and makes us think if they can pedal to the far side of the world, then we should all be able to get on our bikes and ride to the shops or work.”
The use of a tripod and lots of backtracking to get wide angle scenic shots reminds me of a bike tour I did in Lebanon in 1994. As far as I can tell this was the first bike tour in the country since the ending of the Civil War. I later helped write Lebanon: A Travel Guide, the first English-language guidebook to the country for twenty years.
I filmed the Lebanon bike trip on a Hi-8 video camera loaned to me by Tyne Tees TV. The footage was never used because Tyne Tees didn’t commission a second series of ‘Chain Gang’, a magazine programme on bikes.
The Hi-8 tapes have been festering in a drawer for years but I watched them the other day and I reckon I could condense the footage into a smart little half-hour programme. I’ll load it to YouTube, iTunes and Vimeo. It was a rough trip. There were okayish hotels in Beirut and other cities but in the Beqa’a valley? Nada.
I’ve had fun watching my discomfort as I did a piece to camera from a bombed out villa where I’d spent the night.
Bike companies: want to book an end-of-part-one advert in the middle of the Lebanon programme or any Quickrelease.tv video? Details here.
Being allowed on David Bernstein’s* The Spokesmen podcast has been good training for appearing on Britain’s Radio 4. I was the ‘cycling expert’ on yesterday’s Traveller’s Tree half-hour travel programme.
Naturally, I was upstaged by the little fella above, my ten year old son, Josh. He even managed to get in juicy plugs for his favourite bike brands, Islabikes and Kona.
The programme was all about holidays from the saddle, horse as well as bike. You can ‘listen to it again’ here.
* What a trooper. He’s just had surgery - on a mashed thumb - but is still podcasting from the Tour of California.
1 ferry. 3 Islabikes. 6 kiddie pannier bags. 1 tent. 2 adults. 10 days. 0 punctures.
Josh Reid is nine. His sisters Hanna and Ellie are seven. All three are now accomplished cycle camping tourists. they cycled, bag-less, 40+ miles a day through the wilds of Northumberland, close to the QR.tv HQ in Newcastle-on-Tyne.
This year, as discussed at length on The Spokesmen podcast, the Reidlets were equipped with touring-specced Islabikes and cycled from home to the DFDS ferry at North Shields and disembarked on to the pristine cycle paths of the Netherlands. The kids decided to carry their own gear this year and did so with Ortlieb’s brightly-coloured waterproof front pannier bags.
Mum had two ancient rear pannier bags. Dad had even more ancient front and rear Karrimor panniers and also lugged a Burley trailer stuffed with camping gear.
Carlton Reid’s bar-bag also contained on-the-fly video equipment and the ‘07 tour will soon be available on YouTube and embedded on this site. Why? To demonstrate that kids can do serious distances on bikes, and still not be puffed by the end of the day.
Kids get a thrill from the sense of achievement, get to see wildlife up close whenever they feel like stopping, and had masses of fun cycling and when camping. Got active kids? Start cycle touring.
More tour pix . Click on ’slideshow’.
Pix include this one of an electric leg, as seen on a campsite near Amsterdam.
Summer holidays. Aaah, bliss. Bliss for kids, that is. For parents it can be a six-week nightmare of shuttling offspring to and from sports camps and baby sitters. For some kids the baby sitter is the family goggle box. When we were younger our summer holidays were spent outside, the real outside, with our friends. Today, for a variety of sad-but-not-quite-true reasons, that’s no longer the done thing.
However, the success of such books as The Dangerous Book for Boys shows there’s a desire to claw back some freedom for our little darlings.
We’ll never get back to the Enid Blyton idyll of children going off on long, multi-day trips without parental taxis but perhaps if the parental taxis were bikes instead of cars we could let out our kids experience at least a part of the unfettered childhood we so fondly remember?
Most of the ten ideas below will be parent-led but here’s a thought: encourage older kids to do some of them without you.
These ideas were written for the August-September issue of Cycle, the CTC magazine, and are all to do with what to do with kids in Britain. If you live outside the UK, the ideas need to be adapted for your neck of the woods.
GO CAMPING
According to market research company Mintel, 18 per cent of all UK families have been on a camping holiday in the past three years. Mintel’s definition of ‘camping holiday’ probably has more to do with Eurocamp-style prepared tents among manicured lawns rather than roughing it in farmer’s fields under a lightweight sliver of taut polyamide. Don’t knock it, the ‘luxury’ version could be an ideal starter for nylon newbies, especially kids.
Arrive without a car and you may find you pay less, especially as you can fit into a smaller plot.
Campsites with all mod-cons have lots of family-friendly facilities, such as laundries, swimming pools and other kids for yours to Read the rest of this entry »
Click on arrow for the news story and pix.
Source: RTE
Links: Irish tourist board Cycle tourism in Ireland Wildflower Cycling Holidays
In May 2007, a report from the European Cyclists Federation said “The United Kingdom offers the best conditions for bicycle carriage on long-distance trains.”
Bicycle Carriage on Long Distance Trains in the European Union may paint a picture we Brits don’t recognise but for an even rosier view of bicycle carriage on trains check out this classic movie short from May 1955. It’s available as a hi-res video available for playing and storing on iPods etc .
Or click on the picture below to make it play in lo-res via YouTube.
CTC members no longer go on group rides via ‘cyclists’ special’ trains. Shame.