There’s nothing unique about today. We didn’t go further than usual, it wasn’t especially hilly. We just cruised the rolling countryside to the South West of where we live. But it was just the perfect way to spend a cycling morning.
Just over 90 minutes into today’s club ride a thought popped into my head. I couldn’t recall us passing any moving cars, from the front or the rear. There might have been one in Ottignies at the start of the ride by the station, but after that I think we opened up with about 30 traffic free kilometres.
It was almost windless so that the even the giant turbines out in the flatlands were still. And if there is sound I can recall beyond the clicking of freewheels it is the sound of skylarks above the fields which are almost ready for harvest.
Some of that was definitely the wonderful network of tiny lanes found by our ride leader but also it reflects how sleepy rural Belgium is on a Sunday morning, especially a hot summer’s day when so many people are on holiday. The villages and farms were no more active than Spain during siesta. Imagine that just 50km from London, or indeed most big cities.
When we first came here it all seemed a bit old fashioned. No Sunday shopping. A ban on noisy implements on a Sunday – so no diy, lawnmowers or hedge cutters. Now we welcome the wonderful tranquillity and the fact that there is no incentive at all for anyone to get up early.
Except the cyclists. I wondered if our group would decline during holiday season but when I rolled up to the station meeting point for 8am if anything it was bigger than usual, well over 60. So in addition to the wonderful riding conditions there was lots of company for our 85km spin.
Not much chance for quality photography in a cruising club-run so only a few atmosphere shots on the mobile as usual.
Music of the day? When I am spinning in a group I am usually concentrating but to today I was so relaxed the music just flowed. What to recommend for “Music to Ride Bikes By”? Lou Reed and Perfect Day seems a bit obvious, but I did manage a few verses. So that’s a good start.
Much better “Summer’s here and the time is right, for cycling in the streets”. At least that’s what Martha Reeves and the Vandellas could have sung. For sheer exuberance let’s take the 1985 Live Aid version which was running through my head for hours today.
A small favour prompted me to revisit this classic Monty Python sketch.
I usually enjoy playing at Bicycle Repair Man, the opportunity to give someone back their cycling through a small tweak or adjustment or fitting a spare that I just happen to have in the shed. Last week it was a tweak to brakes and gears and my colleague was off.
However while I am happily tweaking other people’s bikes I am deeply in need of a bit of BRM magic myself. How would our hero have coped with the complexity and diversity of modern bikes? I have spent absolutely hours going nowhere in the last few weeks on just one bike while it holds up painful decisions on other machines.
The main problem is my clunker, the work bike that I actually do most of my miles on. It is a carefully crafted beast because it combines lots of thrown together parts that create a bike that looks really ugly but actually has exactly what I need. With a good layer of dirt and grease on top it is the machine nobody wants to steal, although I do get looks on the train that are almost as dirty as the bike. But it can do almost anything from the daily commute to low level mountain biking in all weathers.
Each incarnation has had a rigid MTB frame (currently a Giant Granite) and fat sturdy puncture-proof tyres from Schwalbe (Marathon Plus) which I ride until something falls apart. The main investment is the rear wheel where I use good quality, otherwise everything else is where I do my experiments, bodging together all sorts of combinations. I have learnt so much passing these bits from frame to frame over the years I reckon I can make most things work.
However this winter played hell with the machinery and in the last few weeks everything decided to pack up at once. The chain and sprockets finally got to the point where I was selecting about 3 gears from 24 and the bottom bracket was making ominous noises.
I spent hours in the shed trying to combine every set of chainrings and cranks I had into something that would work but there’s not a lot of point when the teeth barely exist.
Got that sorted eventually (spent money – hate that) but a week later the bottom bracket just seized with some suitably horrible crunching, fortunately just a short distance from home. I was about to start replacing that when I noticed a crack in the frame, so it has finally bit the dust, not bad for a machine of unknown history found abandoned in a Reading park several years ago.
New frame then.
Off to Cyclo, the well thought of bike recycler in Brussels that takes all the old bikes off the street and operates a social enterprise and community workshop in search of a frame.
What a treasure trove, buzzing with customers and atmosphere. Hundreds of bikes of all styles and vintages waiting to for buyers, most €100-€200. I would love to have had a few hours in there, I am sure there were some classics waiting to emerge.
However it was a practical visit and I was treated to a trip down the basement where the recently arrived and unused bikes were stashed. It was actually pretty easy, within minutes we had found a scratched and battered MTB frame with a bottom bracket and headset that looked just the job.
Back to the office on the metro and then I entertained the office when I set off for the station with my burden.
Nothing unusual about that in my mind, they obviously haven’t met enough bike bodgers here. Next stage of the chaos then ensued because SNCB had managed to cancel one train and tried to force two trainloads of passengers onto one half sized train. The bloke with two dirty bikes got lots of cautious looks from anyone wearing pale summer clothes although there was general good humour about my antics, climbing in and out at every stop with both machines to let people on and off.
But no matter how painful the process had been so far I now needed the satisfaction of getting the project moving properly to put the wasted hours behind me. So off to the shed.
I was actually making reasonable progress until I got to my final job of the night. Putting the wheels into the frame to set up the brakes..
I then stood back in amazement. I was going mad. The wheels had shrunk. Nothing would line up.
And slowly it dawned on me that the frame may have looked in every aspect like an MTB, but it was actually a typical continental trekking-bike set up, 700C touring wheels in a MTB set-up.
Arrggghhh – fallen into the incompatibility trap. And in this case one with a special Belgian twist. A check on the internet showed that indeed the Diamond Galaxy is a Belgian made trekker, not an MTB.
I spent last night and all my bike ride to work this morning stewing, cogitating and creating. Don’t have a plan yet – I need a sprinkle of some BRM magic.
Three types of brake possible but maybe not a full set of each, loads of wheels with umpteen gears, few of which are compatible with each other or maybe I can use it as the tourer for which it was designed and I’ll start again on a new work bike.
There is the common sense “take it back and try again” option, but that breaks just too many rules.
Thank goodness it doesn’t involve my other current maintenance hates – mainly hydraulic disk brakes. If you really want to annoy me just now put a post in a forum describing in detail a simple process that requires me to buy a kit, read about, understand and buy loads of different incompatible oils and widgets for two separate bikes and then enjoy fiddling with it for hours. Oh really? Please – wires and levers of single design – please!
Bicycle Repair Man you had it easy when bikes were black and the only thing involving pressures was a quick squeeze on the tyres. But you are still our hero and I’ll be reminded of you the next time I can tweak something that puts someone back on the road.
Time to catch up with some brief cycling impressions of one of Austria’s leading cycling cities. This is a belated blog post because I was there a few weeks ago at the end of a holiday in the region but … Continue reading →
One year ago I promised I would wear yellow on my Sunday bike ride to celebrate the first ever British winner of the Tour de France.
I think it is time to dust off the colours again, this time to celebrate Chris Froome which is going to make it an extraordinary double for those of us who have endured years of cycling starvation. My Belgian club probably won’t even register the colour change, but I will know.
I cannot bring myself to celebrate the fact that he carries the brand of the loathsome Murdoch empire but I can’t help but enjoy yet another three weeks of wheeled chess on the roads.
Two more good reasons too – firstly family bragging rights in the in Fantasy Tour de France competition – sorry boys, eat my shorts! Maillot Jaune pour moi.
Finally even if Froome was not riding under the British flag (Belgian TV will only call him “the white Kenyan”) I think his win is cause for celebration among another special group of cyclists. Let’s hear it for the nodding donkeys, the people whose style doesn’t leave the purists humming, the upright, those of us who cannot bend like a hairpin and lie sleekly over our handlebars.
Not for us the smooth style of Wiggins or the low frontal area of Cavendish, the silky descending of Nibali.
I was prepared to take Dan Martin as our hero for the year, but let’s face it, Chris Froome is for us.
About a year ago I wrote my Tale of Two Italian Cities post about how two cities just 50km apart could be so different were in attitude and approach to cycling.
I had a similar experience last weekend.
On Friday I got on a train from Brussels and travelled 40 minutes North.
On Monday I got left from the same station and travelled 40 minutes South.
In both cases I didn’t really have an opportunity to travel into the city centre so I had to draw my conclusions about cycling from the immediate vicinity of the station. You might do so too.
Go North
Go South
Maybe it is time to regain a little friendship from my colleagues in Flanders, for the apparent cycle friendly mecca is indeed Ghent.
The struggling cycling metropolis to our South is Lille, in France.
To its credit, it does have L’ville, an extremely good Bike Sharing system at the station, operated and supported by Decathlon cycling subsidiary B’Twin which is based in the city.
Personally I enjoyed my ride in the sunshine despite being limited to the industrial outskirts of the city but it is perhaps symptomatic of the limited progress by France as a transport cycling nation that the provision was very disjointed and there was such a woefully low expectation about cycle parking at this major transport hub.
Last Friday I was taken to the front line of a full on cycling row that has erupted in Flanders, finally forcing the Prime Minister who was on a foreign trip on to the front pages of De Standaard to insist that he “would be looking in to it”
I have to share this storm in the tiniest of teacups because I don’t think we would see anything like this anywhere else except in the cycle sports mad world that exists around Ghent. And the story also has the dumbest punchline.
The background to the story is common enough. The community in Gavere, about 10km south of Ghent have complained that the “wheeled terrorists” have taken over their riverside and that they are constantly afraid. We have heard that before in many countries, most recently in the UK where there is a simmering row about the numbers of cyclists on canal towpaths or around the Olympic Road Race circuit at Box Hill.
However the difference here is the scale and the political fallout as the “terrorists” hit back.
The battleground is a long wide and perfectly smooth traffic free path that follows the Scheldt south from Ghent for miles making a perfect environment for cycling and walking.
But its strengths are its weakness.
The smooth asphalt is a beautiful temptation for roadies to fly along at speed and the width means that the sort of club groups that are common in Belgium can travel down it in big echelons, especially at the weekend. And we are talking big, I see groups of 30-50 riders where I live and round Ghent I guess numbers are huge.
And speeds are high, as we rode the three of us were doing close to 20mph at times and we were passed by faster groups.
So out of the blue a series of white “rumble strips” – the now notorious ribbelstroken have appeared across the path.
The first row was apparently whether they were initiated by the municipality or by Waterwegen en Zeekanaal (waterway and sea canals) who manage the navigation. Had the mayor of Gavere exceeded his authority? Or does the fact that they are spread over a wider area implicate the navigation managers?
But regardless of the origins of the work the sports cyclists were soon up in arms that anybody would mess with their training route. With their influence it soon hit the pages of De Standard and ribbelstroken became a new hot topic. While we were out for a ride there was another newspaper photographer out for the evening getting background shots and pictures of the offending strips. His presence prompted a stop for a lively debate by the roadside.
By Monday it had got to the Prime Minister of Flanders Kris Peeters, far away in France on a visit to Le Tour. Another distinctly Flemish twist, when was the last time your Prime Minister nipped off to see the Tour in another country? Well it was all above board, he was there as a guest of DCM, the Flemish company that co-sponsors the Vacansoleil pro bike team in the tour, not a jolly of course.
He probably thought he was away from domestic concerns but in France he had the misfortune to be ambushed by Vancansoleil pro Thomas De Gendt who it turns out likes to use the offending route for his speed training.
I have to say that the prospect of one of the world’s top riders doing 50kmph down a riverside path probably confirms every local citizen’s worst prejudices about wheeled terrorists, but he certainly got the Prime Minister on the spot. So by Monday the ribbelstroken were right up there on the front page news of De Standaard right beside the pictures of Chris Froome and within the day the Mobility Minister was out there riding her bike up and down the towpath with the local cycling groups.
The punchline?
Well it looks like the Mobility Minister was discrete in her words when she said “It was not as dramatic as I had heard.”
Not dramatic? It was pathetic!
This is a country with some of the finest cobblestones on the planet. Cyclists go out of their way to race over the rumbly stuff. It is the world centre of cyclocross. And frankly Belgian road surfaces can at times be almost third world. Anybody who remotely considers himself to be a serious cyclist around Ghent should be laughing at the pathetic little ripples on the path.
In line skaters – yes, big disruption. Wheelchair users – definitely an issue. So yes the strips will be cut back to allow movement round the ends.
But the self-promoting hardest bike riders in Europe? Come on chaps, give us a break! Even the senior citizens ride didn’t bat an eyelid.
But the hard men of Ghent have spoken, apparently the experiment will not be continued.
As a result of an invitation from Vincent Meershaert of Traject Mobility Management in Ghent I spent last Friday evening on a scenic ride out from Ghent into the Flemish Ardennes and some bits of the Tour of Flanders race route.
Only my second time there on a bike after my visit in spring to watch the Tour itself so I was very much looking forward to new discoveries, especially with hosts who were rightly proud of their cycling heritage. I got an invitation because like Vincent I am one of the “odd guys”, people who work in the field of cycling for transport and mobility but who also have a love for sports cycling. That may not seem too strange to an English speaking audience but in Europe it is actually quite rare, they are usually two different worlds.
What a great way to start the weekend with a beautiful 80km route put together by Vincent’s colleague Kristof. And to see first-hand how big the Wielrenner (sports cyclist) culture is around Ghent, even though it was Friday after work there were lycra-clad riders all over the place, clearly enjoying a warm, if overcast evening.
However we were not the only ones out, we found this great group of “seniors” out by the Scheldt too.
The ride managed to throw in a whole mix of riding that seemed to capture the area extremely well. As we were returning from the ride Vincent and I were musing again on the fact that Belgium is so little known for cycle touring, a combination of lack of marketing and the competition from the surrounding countries I am sure.
The only people I know of who would consciously head for this area to ride bikes would all be like me, drawn by the legendary black and white images of mud covered racers battling across cobbles in the spring classics. (See earlier post about the Ronde Van Vlaanderen Museum on Oudenarde)
What we actually got was almost car free country lanes, excellent cycle paths, a 4 metre wide car free route along the river Scheldt and outstanding signposting and route choice. The tidy flower-filled villages and towns reflected the fact that this is a more prosperous area of Belgium and that civic pride is alive and well. Above all else the Belgians I ride with and talk to in both Flanders and Wallonia are genuinely surprised when I tell them the very best thing about being here is just how deserted the minor roads and lanes feel to a visitor and tonight was no exception. OK, we crossed some major roads but away from them it was peaceful cycling with almost no need to ride single file at all. Our group were sports cyclists, so our route took us well into the Flemish Ardennes by design, but flat earth riders could easily have stuck to the valleys for a very leisurely and attractive tour.
None of the climbs we did was a monster, the low lying countryside allows only about 100 metres of ascent each time and the climbs we did were mostly
well surfaced and no more than 5-8% grade with occasional steep corners. Not to downplay it, 100km of these coming back-to-back with some of the steeper cobbled beast climbs thrown in would be a really tough ride, anyone completing the Tour of Flanders sportive deserves respect.
But that wasn’t why we were here, we were enjoying fun climbing to get lovely views over the countryside with its patchwork of fields, trees and church spires in every direction. It was great to dip and roll with the landscape, both climbs and swooping descents. Some pave, but only one section was the full on experience of riding on a pneumatic drill for about a kilometre.
By the time we got back my legs knew they had been in a ride, but I was glowing with pleasure.
So once again I can issue the call to fellow cycling travellers. Come here. Get out of Brussels and Bruges, avoid the main industrial cities and try real rural Belgium, it is a great place to be a cyclist. More challenging perhaps to get the tourist authorities to market the area effectively to the outside world but I suspect that is part of a wider malaise in Belgium, it certainly seems to pride itself on “under-stated”!
The Route
Kristof put our route up on line so you can follow the route and the profile which at this scale does look a bit like shark’s teeth, but it wasn’t quite so fierce, honest. http://ridewithgps.com/routes/2711551
I have just had to kill an hour between trains in Cologne.
As it is a lovely day I wandered outside the Hauptbahnhof to the Cathedral Square (Domplatz), up onto the pedestrian cyclist bridge over the Rhine and looked back at the leafy path car free route along the river bank.
Disgrace. Unacceptable. Impossible. Out of control. Can’t be done. What do they think they are doing?
Yes hundreds of cyclists and pedestrians are inhabiting the same space. Politely. Without conflict. Without the world coming to an end. And its official – this is a major corridor across the river for all users.
Young ruffians on BMX bikes. Lycra louts. Parents setting a bad example. Old and young; male and female.
Oh, and you know what – that bridge rail isn’t specially raised to stop the lemmings with pedals throwing themselves off. So that bridge will have to be closed off immediately. The signs industry can celebrate as hundreds of “Cyclist Dismount” signs are ordered and the economy is saved.
Enough cynicism Englishman. Just because you come from a country that is frequently clueless about creating great cycling places doesn’t mean you have to infect the whole of Europe!
In fact it is a wonderful sight as the quiet German cycling revolution continues. Personally I am convinced that the large areas of car free permeable city and town centres that people actually want to walk and cycle in are as big a contributor to the growth in cycling here as many other measures. I must get round to posting the photos I took in Leipzig recently that showed just the same pattern as I have seen throughout the country.
In fact the more time I spend around Germany’s cycling stories the more I do not despair for the future of the human race. To my long suffering cycle campaigning friends in Britain can I just offer a suggestion that there is far more to creating a cycling culture than going Dutch, and there are fantastic examples right here.
PS Some things are however crimes against nature. I have saved them to last, to avoid upsetting the sensitive among you.
The British and Irish Lions beat the Aussies comprehensively at rugby.
Despite all my best intentions I am totally addicted to the Tour de France all over again. Incredible stage today, impossible not to watch.
There is a Brit in yellow at the Tour.
And some bloke called Murray won Wimbledon ending 77 years of famine.
How good is that?
To be honest I am almost as pleased by the bike ride as anything else. I had a 60 mile day with the Belgian club I have started riding with and I the brilliant weather it was outstanding. I avoided the calamities of my last ride and we saw our all the best of our local countryside. And once again it was almost car free! (Club Cyclotouriste d’Ottignies Louvain-la-Neuve)
The first few kilometres took us out of the dips and valleys of Walloon Brabant and then we rolled through the flatlands to the south with just a few ripples in the landscape. The villages were looking great, not least the beautiful chateau at Sombreffe which could have been almost anywhere in more celebrated landscapes in France.
On the way back we followed a similar pattern, to the point where one of the riders muttered that everything was a bit easy today. It looked awfully like we were going to get back about 30 minutes early, until the ride leader threw in about 40 minutes of climbing on a lot of the short, sharp climbs of in the area around Ottignies – we seemed to go up and down a lot of times and by the end my legs were hanging. But it was the sort of satisfied pain that comes with a good day out.
When I finished Velo-city I was exhausted, not just by the work and the hours but also because I was fighting a cold the whole week. (Insert man-flu insults here)
Going to the Attersee in Upper Austria with my wife was a planned escape to chill out and recover which for me always includes getting in a few bike rides of some type. Last year in Canada was my special treat to mountain bike at Whistler and tour across British Columbia straight after the event. If had even thought about cycling or mountain biking like that this year it would have been a complete disaster, I would hardly have made any progress.
For three days I was just floored and very happy to be carried around the lake by ferry and lie on the bank in the wonderful summer heat. I didn’t even hassle the landlady for the free bikes promised at the hotel which is very out of character. In fact I was dreading that feeling of a first ride after a break, the knowledge that my legs would be like jelly and in the heat I would really suffer.
But on Wednesday the bikes turned up and within a couple of hours I just knew I couldn’t resist. I also knew I didn’t fancy the busy road around the lake, I was just so tempted by the minor roads and tracks up and away from the side of the valley that decided to take the risk that I would expire and head up and away for a few km.
Up the first slope I was very grateful for the extra big sprocket provided by a Shimano Megarange 34 tooth sprocket because it was a real struggle. However then I looked back. Maybe just a hundred metres gained and I had a spectacular view over the Attersee.
And then suddenly I was back. I just wanted to ride up and away to take in the views and get that sense of achievement that comes from getting to the top of a decent hill. I really did find myself saying “its back, I’ve got my mojo back” which does seem toe-curlingly embarrassing now.
After that I was able to enjoy the tracks that led up into the hills and do a great loop around the Wachtberg. Only a few km but quite a lot of climbing up around the beautifully tended farmhouses and then along wooded trails before a tricky descent back almost to lake level at Alexenau and back to Weyregg am Attersee with great views all the way along. The best 7km ride in ages!
Once the ice was cracked I was into my riding for the next three days. The network of roads and trails was just stunning. Just as importantly they were brilliantly waymarked and I could almost have navigated without the map. I nearly made it up to around 1000 metres every day on climbs like the Gahberg and the scenery was just stunning, plus we had some great rides together. I didn’t complete either of them but the temptation of the longer distance Salzkammergut mountain bike routes like the Richtberg Runde and the Krahberg Runde were always there – maybe an excuse to come back.
Despite the bike being a very ordinary mtb clone the KTM Lifejoy it did at least have a triple chainset and the Megarange so I could ride everything. Surfaces were not technical, mostly dirt road, so the challenge was steady climbing, not staying on the bike. I wasn’t properly kitted up for full cross country with helmet and toolkit so I had to be a bit careful not to get stranded in the middle of nowhere because there were certainly almost no other riders, astonishing given the quality of the riding.
None of the rides was longer than a couple of hours but all were proper summer holiday rides, great scenery , great weather, hardly anyone around and properly recharging the batteries.
A decent photo gallery too. (just take a look at the route profile on the final photo!)
There are many special events in Vienna to celebrate its year of the bicycle.
Opening to coincide with our Velo-city conference two weeks ago was Tour du Monde, an exhibition at MAK, Vienna’s design museum.
It features the amazing bike collection of Viennese architect Michael Embacher which is normally kept privately but includes some of cycling’s design classics and some quite rare pieces.
We called in for the formal opening on the night of the mass bike ride at Velo-city (the Radcorso – story here). As even the German speakers told me the speeches were pretty dull I was glad I skipped them to take a wander round the collection.
I am not really a bike technology buff but I really appreciate some of the classics and it was good to see them displayed well. They were hung as art from the ceiling and lit from above but the nice touch was that they were hung in sweeping curved lines which gave a nice feeling of movement in a static display. Almost like an aerial peloton perhaps.
Each bike had a short history on the wall too which brought them to life.
Embacher certainly has an eye for some interesting pieces, including famous racing machines and good old British steel. The post war Raleigh Roadster special edition export bike in chrome was pretty special, as was the Bob Jackson Super Legend with curly stays. (both above)
One I particularly enjoyed was the Gitane Enfant special edition road bike from the early 80s. I remember seeing them in magazines at the time, I was too old to have something that small but I remember thinking how cool it would have been to have been a French kid with a bike like that. Looking at it hanging in the exhibit it took me a moment to work out what I was seeing, it was this odd looking thing, but then it is clearer that it is a small bike with adult parts, more obvious when it was seen with its big brother beside it.
The exhibition is on until October – if you like vintage bikes or just good design it is well worth a visit and it is a rarely seen collection. Details here.
Another one of those diversions for the cycle tourist travelling Eurovelo 6 along the Danube this summer perhaps. To tempt you or if you cannot make it Embacher’s collection of over 200 cycles can be found here
I have written before about how much I love being by the Danube with its promise of travels through history. However on this trip we saw another side of the great river, a treacherous beast only just held in check by mankind.
The recurring nightmare running up to our trip to Bratislava was that the city might be flooded by the surge of rainwater heading down after torrential rains right across central Europe. We were due to arrive Friday night and the peak flood waters were due just 24 hours earlier.
Consider that this is June. A month’s rainfall fell in two days across the high ground that feeds many of Europe’s great rivers, ground already saturated from the wet spring. Anyone who has been watching the Giro d’Italia bike race knows that it has been an appalling month across much of the Alps. Quickly the news showed the German town of Passau flooded by the Danube and its confluence with the Inn and Liz rivers. Then Prague was swamped by the Vltava River and all along the Danube and the Elbe communities were waiting for the surge.
Vienna itself was almost untouched because it has some of the most extensive flood relief systems in Europe, but now it was heading for Bratislava and Budapest. This was a particularly difficult time because after massive floods in 2002 the new flood defences in Bratislava were only a few years old and had never been tested.
During the week running up to the ECF AGM a planned cycle tour from Bratislava to Vienna was cancelled as the Eurovelo routes became impassable and nobody knew what condition they might be in when the waters dropped.
On Saturday morning we couldn’t resist a bit of voyeurism by walking down to the banks of the river in Bratislava. I was an extraordinarily impressive sight and one that made me realise just how precariously we try to control such massive bodies of water. According to reliable sources (our taxi driver) the river was carrying five times its normal volume of water.
One day after the peak we could look across the giant expanse rushing powerfully by the city centre, almost on our eye level behind the flood barriers. It was clear from the lines on the side of the temporary flood barriers that this must have been a very near miss.
Ship traffic was banned because of the levels so there were working boats moored all along the banks, but most striking were the floating hotels, keeling over to one side because their entrances were moored below water level. Police were patrolling the banks to stop idiocy – people climbing onto the barriers or trying to get across to the boats I guess.
And it was all such a contrast to the scene behind the barriers. All along the banks are extensive cycle paths and there was an excellent foot and pedestrian bridge slung underneath the main car bridge into the city.
In the stunning warm weather we were among hundreds of people all out for what would have been family and friends bike rides around the river bank. However it was apparent that almost everyone just needed to linger that bit longer to take in the power of the river, and maybe to contemplate just how close they had been to another serious flood.
The missing posts before I started blogging about Velo-city and our summer holiday were the two days we spent en route in Bratislava, capital of Slovakia.
We were there for the annual general meeting of ECF, my employers, when we bring our members together for a couple of days to do the formalities of running an international association, but also to catch up with old friends from the cycle campaigning world.
Bratislava was selected because we wanted to be in proximity to Vienna so many people could travel on the following week, but to give us a chance to meet in a different environment with a different community.
The meeting itself fulfilled all those expectations but a residing memory will be the number of people who said “Wow, Bratislava, I never knew”
The old town and the castle that overlooks it have been charmingly restored to provide a historic and largely car free environment that are a delight to wander.
Much of the restoration is quite recent, friends from neighbouring countries were as surprised by the centre as us first timers, reporting that even twenty years ago Bratislava was dark, dirty and industrial. Outside the centre are apparently some of the communist era’s largest housing estates and old industrial centres but as a tourist in the centre one would never know.
The castle overlooks the city and has a great panoramic view over the Danube. It was a hot walk up to the top, especially the staggered staircase but once up there the view over the river and the red roofs of the old town was great, especially from the lovely terrace café.
The warm weather was also particularly welcome because lets face it we have had a truly awful winter and spring. Time to take a bowl of one of the local delicacies, sheep’s cheese with pasta, and chill out.
I have been told so many times by cycle tourists that they get so fixed on the riding that they forget to stop and actually appreciate the towns and cities they ride through. I can imagine that riding the Danube cycle route (part of Eurovelo 6) one could just forget to turn into the old city set just back from the waterside in Bratislava or avoid climbing the hill to the castle.
That would be a huge mistake. And it would be unfair to our hosts, the Ekopolis Foundation (Nadácia Ekopolis, known also as the Slovak Environmental Partnership) and Slovenský Cykloklub who certainly showed us a new destination to enjoy.
Tomorrow the nine hour train journey from Salzburg to Brussels will mark the transition from holiday back to reality. The hotel wi-fi has enabled me to download the dreaded emails and the Salzburg weather has turned foul in celebration.
If I count all the photos and stories that are bubbling round in my brain I could be posting for two months but I am sure some of it will fade, sometimes an idea that just seemed right at the time turns to mush when confronted with a keyboard.
However stand by for a sequence which will include the unexpectedly delightful Bratislava old town, deep immersion into the cycling frenzy of Velo-city Vienna and then a week’s relaxation by the beautiful Attersee in the Upper Austria (Oberosterreich) region. It is part of a great tourism area marketed as the Salzkammergut and thoroughly recommended.
A great time, loads of cycle chat and some lovely images to share. Now I just need another holiday to write it all up!
Just over 90 minutes into today’s club ride a thought popped into my head. I couldn’t recall us passing any moving cars, from the front or the rear. There might have been one in Ottignies at the start of the ride by the station, but after that I think we opened up with about 30 traffic free kilometres.
When we first came here it all seemed a bit old fashioned. No Sunday shopping. A ban on noisy implements on a Sunday – so no diy, lawnmowers or hedge cutters. Now we welcome the wonderful tranquillity and the fact that there is no incentive at all for anyone to get up early.
Except the cyclists. I wondered if our group would decline during holiday season but when I rolled up to the station meeting point for 8am if anything it was bigger than usual, well over 60. So in addition to the wonderful riding conditions there was lots of company for our 85km spin.
so only a few atmosphere shots on the mobile as usual.
I Do Not Despair 