Cycle Touring

This is one of my first attempts at making a short film about cycle touring. It was a combination of two cycle tours that happened in May and then during my children’s summer holiday in 2012. The first time I cycle toured with my three children…..it was a test run. We took as little as possible, only one tent between the 4 of us on a tour of 3 nights around Penwith in Cornwall…..from home to home. Well summer came and we were all looking forward to a longer tour and this time we had own tents, We already had a lot of equipment from family camping trips to Cumbria and Scotland over the years……good times….

My partner Julia and I had been on several cycle tours before we had children and had always talked and half planned of going on a more ambitious long distance cycle touring trip as a family. We wanted to wait a while though…. to introduce our children to cycle touring slowly, to let them discover for themselves the freedom, the excitement and the joy of exploring the world through cycling…..Since 2007 we had been cycling to school

It was complicated though….. tragically we had suffered the worst loss imaginable….. Julia was diagnosed with cancer….a brain stem glioma in early 2010 and died in my arms  in August 2010. In 2012 we were effectively being made homeless. But rather than despair, I turned it around into an adventure. My children had been through so much I decided let’s do something positive, we had everything we needed, so with a few months planning, a lot of hard work and difficult decisions, including sorting out 26 years of accumulated stuff, and that really took us to the very last moment to sort….but then it was done, and we set off.

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This is always something of an evolving process…..even during the tour things change, at least for me. I mean sure there are the basic essential things. The tent, sleeping bag minimal clothing waterproofs that sort of thing but it is complicated with my work and the limited choice I have with what art materials I take…..but even the route I decide upon in planning will inevitably change. That is the essence of exploration….and the unbounded joy of cycle touring…. that I can go almost anywhere, it is not something written in stone. For me if the tour was planned and mapped out to the tiniest detail I probably wouldn’t bother…..

Things had changed dramatically over the previous few years about which I will not write about here…so delay’s in continuing the cycle tour came and went.  This video details what I started the 2017 cycle tour with, and the next day the tour began…..

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Eireann, our third country of our world cycle tour…..We had a truly wonderful tour, battered by Atlantic storms, at times the summer was more like a sempiternal autumn, with gales fog mist rain….it was glorious and we cannot wait to return.

Eireann, our third country of our world cycle tour…..We had a truly wonderful tour, battered by Atlantic storms, at times the summer was more like a sempiternal autumn, with gales fog mist rain….it was glorious and we cannot wait to return.