Almost time to finish, but all the delegates seem to agree that they saw a new Vienna this week. Bike culture on the streets, but even the historic urban architecture was looking particularly spruce.
It was for me! Last time I was here we were swaddled up against late spring cold, now we saw an outdoor city, a lively city, stunning weather after the rain of the early week.
Danke
Intrepid ECF photographer Chloe trusted me enough to let me pilot the cargobike around Vienna last night for a fantastic evening of bikes, of sights, of scenery and the fellowship of the wheel.
She captured hundreds of shots which will take some sorting, but suffice to say we had a ball. Over 1000 delegates were joined by nearly 4000 local riders for a great evening out, part festival, part bike ride.
Hard to believe it is almost over for another year, but there will be a rich repository of blog material for the next few weeks! (And lots, lots more on Twitter, follow me on @maynekevin and #VC13 for the Velo-city coverage)
The case is proven when you lose your credit card at a metro station, but one of the next users is also a conference delegate, sees the word “cyclists” on the card and hands it to the organisers who promptly got it back to me.
How cool is that?
The final technical tweaks are made and the team is waiting for 1300 delegates to hit Velo-city for the week.
Even the technical tours have gone ahead despite the rain!
Just excited now about the prospect of eating, sleeping, drinking cycling for four days.
Like many parents I spent this weekend collecting my son from university.
No stress despite lots more kilometres to travel since we moved to Belgium, and the first experience of driving a left-hand drive car on British roads. No stress at all from discovering the stolen bike or the state of the student room. (ugh).
Why not?
Because my son goes to university in Aberystwyth, right on the far west coast of Wales, overlooking Cardigan Bay.
I am almost afraid to blog about it because you might go there and spoil it, one of my favourite places in the world. Just through Abergavenny and the Brecon Beacons National Park rises up around the road and I spent two hours passing through the stunning scenery. The motorway driving becomes a distant memory.
I stopped at Nant y Arian forest park in the late afternoon to have a coffee, take a seat and just soak up the view before I dropped down to Aber. Red kites flying overhead and sunlight running across the hills. I was really jealous of the mountain bikers using the outstanding trails at Nant that I knew from another trip and I really would like to have had a few hours for some cycle touring, but that is another time.
Down at Aberystwyth I was just able to soak up evening light, a sunset over the bay and in the morning a sharp, crisp sunlight over the coast. I hadn’t taken my camera so the fact that it even looks good on a mobile phone is a testament to how great it was.
I am sure he appreciates that he has chosen one of the best university locations in the world, at least in the UK, but I know his Dad sure does.
Next time cycle touring or mountain biking too.
A few weeks ago I amused some of you with my post “Duel at Dawn” in which I told the tale of the old sporty cyclist faced by another cyclist on the morning road.
The tale took a new twist this morning.
I was thrashing my way through the hills of the Foret de Soignes at my usual lumbering pace when I suddenly heard the swish of a bike tyre beside me and a cyclist zoomed past up the hill.
Without even looking I knew that I was being passed by some flying roadie in lycra and I was going to have little chance of slipstreaming the passing rider even if I put on a burst.
Except 
I was being passed by a woman on an upright bike in day clothes.
It took quite a few revolutions before the penny dropped.
E-bike.
The battery pack was the give away which I discovered when I got over the hill not too far behind her and then caught up freewheeling down the other side.
Amazing experience – we followed each other for about 3 km – me pulling ahead on descents and at any busy junctions but she absolutely flew up the climbs effortlessly and on the last one I just expired like a burst balloon and watched the green spot vanish.
It was the first E-bike I have seen in Brussels and you don’t see many of them on the commute in many countries because people are worried about storage at the other end. But we know from Germany and the Netherlands that the E-bike revolution is letting more people ride further, more often, in sensible normal clothes. Great to see it in Belgium.
Just not good for the ego of 50-something roadies. Time to move on.
Another week, another cycling fans’ café.
This week I am sipping a coffee surrounded surrounded by memories of Flemish cycling. Perhaps fittingly it is grey and raining outside which matches the grainy black and white photographs which decorate most of the walls.
This is the Brasserie des Flandrians, the nice bar and restaurant in the Tour of Flanders Centre in the town of Oudenaarde. I had been expecting to write you a rant about how the Belgians were stupid enough to close a tourist attraction on a public holiday Monday because their web site said the museum was closed. But when I arrived to meet some friends who are cycle touring across Belgium to spend a few days with us I was delighted to see the lights on and I could immerse myself in a hundred years of history while I waited.
No need to write much, the pictures and images do most of the talking, but a few of my personal picks are underneath this pictorial homage.
The museum guide is a familiar face to local fans, former Tour of Flanders winner and world champion Freddie Maertens was putting on a very animated performance to a coach party of adoring fans who doted on every word and anecdote, I only wish I spoke Dutch because it sounded like fun. Here he is today and in the 1970s.
For British fans and old bike geeks Tommy Simpson is remembered, both by his 1962 Gitane with its Brooks saddle, and by a bust next to his Flandria cycling shirt.
Breaking away from the impression that this was as much about Flanders as it was about the race was hard, the introductory film was great for atmosphere but its roll call of double and treble winners managed to ignore anyone who wasn’t Belgian! Similarly buried in a corner was a small section which acknowledged to a small extent that women exist with some photos of the recently introduced women’s Tour of Flanders. I was delighted that its principle star was Nicole Cooke, I have a feeling her “all or nothing” riding style endeared her to local fans.
The interactive elements were popular with kids large and small, especially a static bike mounted on some asymmetric rollers which were supposed to simulate riding on the cobbles. Very funny expressions, lots of noise and plenty of cheering and egging on when the coach party got to that section.
And I have to say there was a gentle sense of humour running through the place with plenty of cartoons and a rather delightful drinks menu at the café which made me smile.
Oudenaarde itself is not a town known for much else but it has an attractive market square and a very impressive church towering over the centre. For the cyclist it is however at the heart of a massive network of cycle touring routes, not least the three Tour of Flanders waymarked routes which if done as a complete set would give any of us a good workout. The steady stream of riders through the brasserie obviously thought so too, although the number of bikes on cars in the market square rather suggests that the weather was playing havoc with riding plans on this particular day.
Click on the links for my previous posts about the Tour of Flanders and riding in the Flemish Ardennes.
Everywhere I go at the moment it seems to start raining.
Stockholm was no different. A sunny evening turned into a very soggy morning.
However I had an absolutely delightful breakfast coffee to look forward to at a rather special café on the Stockholm scene,
The Bianchi café.
Italian café, Italian staff, fantastic cappuccino and celeste blue bicycles displayed almost as art. Pictures of some of the great Bianchi riders rotating on an electronic screen in the window.
In the back of the café a very good bike shop selling everything you could wish for to go with your passion – from caps to cufflinks.
The breakfast coffee was all the better because I had it in the company of Tony Gimaldi whose family owns the Bianchi brand. He told me the great story of how his family’s Swedish industrial conglomerate got into the bike business in Sweden but some years later after a number of acquisitions got the chance to buy the struggling Bianchi business.
When he went to Italy to start integrating the business into their other bike businesses Tony not only found his Italian family roots it was very, very clear from his passion that he fell hook, line and sinker for the Bianchi legend. He was great company and I suspect we could have talked for hours had time allowed, especially in that setting.
Any bike nuts going to Stockholm – this is your place.
I was in Schweinfurt visiting the German training and development centre for SRAM recently.
My main reason for being there was to talk about cycling advocacy to SRAM’s urban cycling event. However at the end of the two day event we had a few hours before I had to get my train back to Belgium so we were offered a social test ride for a couple of hours. As the weather was delightful and spring-like it would be rude not to, wouldn’t it? So this was an opportunity to take in another region I knew nothing about – Lower Franconia, almost in the centre of Germany.
My recent cycle touring in Germany has been limited to a few sessions around the Bodensee (Lake Constance) where I had seen the evidence of the boom in leisure cycling in Germany. But here I saw other dimensions of that boom that had been less apparent in the summer holiday throngs in the south.
We were taken a short distance out of Schweinfurt into the countryside to a delightful area around Gerolzhofen and the popular rural area of the Steigerwald which has attractive villages and delightful countryside.
From there we were able to sample the impressive network of segregated cycle tracks and minor roads for a couple of hours until we ended up crossing the River Main by ferry and enjoying a snack in a terrace café overlooking the river and its busy cycle route in Obereisenheim.
I was hugely impressed by the number of cycle tourists I saw and the facilities we used but on a working day the people who were out were almost universally older (let’s say seniors to be polite). I had heard about Germany’s grey cycling revolution but I had never seen it personified, it was extraordinary that a busy cycle route could be 90% one demographic.
And the next revolution was what they were riding. I have blogged before about the way E-bikes have taken over at the German trade shows and I know that in the last couple of years they have taken a huge slice of the market, but I hadn’t seen where they were being used. Now I could see it writ large – nearly 50% of the bikes we saw were E-bikes, often in pairs. And the lovely little town of Volkach had adopted it so much they had put an ugly E-bike charging station in the middle of their attractive town square.
It seemed a bit incongruous, a glorified luggage locker in a medieval square, but it further reinforced the point that if you want elderly German cycle tourists that means catering for the new E-bike phenomenon.
In fact the café we ended up at down on the River Main only had one customer type the whole time we were there. Cyclists. I know numerous studies have been done showing the economic value of cycle tourists in rural areas but if we could count the percentage of turnover for the Gasthof zum Schiff in Obereisenheim it would indeed be impressive.
All in all an excellent afternoon out, great scenery, nice company and the chance to see a number of cycling trends all brought to life in one place. There is little wonder that cycling is growing solidly in Germany, they really have so many positive things happening they all seem to complement each other.
When I am beating my head against a headwind on the open fields of Wallonia what I really want is a good hedge. A nice embankment and a proper bank of thick bushes to break up the monotony. A couple of weeks ago I rode nearly 50km into head winds and it was a pretty painful experience, I would have been happy to hide behind a single tree towards the end.
Belgian farmers seem to have adopted the trend that British farmers got into from the 1970s onwards when every hedge had to be removed to allow the plough to get as close to the edge of the field as possible, regardless on the impact on landscape or wildlife, partly encouraged by EU subsidies that used to pay subsidies to farmers by the productive metre.
Later we learned just what that was doing to biodiversity and erosion and some farmers started restoring them but here the message doesn’t seem to have got through.
And of course when they need the hedge to keep in animals the cheap response is to put up a wire fence with an electric charge round it which isn’t a lot of fun for any human or animal that happens to bump into them. Poor Murphy found that out in the last two weeks since livestock got introduced to the field next door. He spent two days in the house refusing to come out after the fence bit him.
Royal Academy Press Release. The Big Hawthorne, 2008. Courtesy of the Artist. © David Hockney. Photo: Richard Schmidt
And the loss of those hedges is just such a shame right now when the blossom is out and there are wildflowers everywhere. Last year the highlight of my visit to the David Hockney exhibition “A bigger picture” was his series of paintings of hawthorn hedges in East Yorkshire throughout the spring. There is a man who really understands the power of the hedge in the English landscape.
One of the best talks I went to when I was a member of the Chilterns Conservation Board was a great presentation by our farming officer who explained “what makes a first class hedge.” Sounds like something for gardening geeks but it turned into a fascinating presentation about the role of hedges as “wildlife freeways” allowing certain plant species, wild birds and small mammals to survive and to move about between communities in shelter and protected from predators.
They make a wonderful feature of some areas of traditional English countryside and help create that patchwork quilt effect so beloved of artists and painters but photography of the landscape during the 20th Century shows just how much they have disappeared.
A good hedge for a cyclist also has many other uses:
The perfect hedge is just right.
Thick enough to provide a windbreak and a shelter.
And exactly shoulder height for a cyclist, which means it is far too high for a motorist to see over, but low enough that we can enjoy secret views everywhere we go.
When we come back from a ride we can wax lyrical about something they have never seen and will never see. That’s a perfect hedge and Belgium needs a lot more of them.
“Qui va pousser l’anglais?”
The call went out across the clubrun today as the group had to slow up to wait for me again as I grovelled up the road behind them.
I wrote about cyclingclubaphobia several weeks ago, that irrational fear of being embarrassed on your first cycling club ride – being left behind, the bike falling apart, falling off – all that good stuff which never really happens.
It did today. A couple of weeks ago it happened to everyone else, this week it happened to me. Last time it was Cyclottignies medium speed group that supplied all the novelties I associate with club cycling, not least managing to lose the ride leader completely halfway through.
Where did he go?
This week the problem was unfortunately entirely of my own making. About 40 people were gathered at the station where we meet but there was considerable discussion about the fact that they didn’t have a leader for Group 2, the ride I was aiming for. Then Francois arrived and after some boisterous negotiation in French he was press-ganged into action. Within minutes he was off and I pulled away with about a dozen riders.
However after about five minutes reality dawned. This group was just a bit too organised, a bit too lean and oh heck I have joined the fast group by mistake and I am going to look pretty silly if I turn back now. Two weeks ago I rode with group 2 and the pace was actually pretty civilised (around 15mph) so if maybe they were a mile or so faster per hour I could just about hang on?
Apparently Francois had been bullied into leading Group 1 so someone else could lead Group 2. I really do have to improve my French if I am going to do this regularly.
The plan worked well for almost an hour and a half. I was hanging on quite well and definitely not embarrassed, so I started to relax. Then I rode straight into the back of the man in front when we made a sudden stop because I decided to absent my brain for a moment. The imprint of my brake lever on his backside wasn’t entirely well received. They know I don’t speak much French but I do know “murder” for some strange reason.
However after that stop the guys in the front decided that it was time the pace went up some more and for the next hour I was grovelling and yo-yoing off the back. They were awfully nice about it and Francois kept telling me I should come back to Group 1 next week because I’d soon get used to it. These are the “cracks” he said, the fast men.
The chap I had hit did get his own back with the call for someone to push me home. I hung on for another 20 minutes to make it up to about three hours and then as soon as I saw a road sign that I recognised I made my apologies and left them to it while I sneaked off to make my way home in a very tired manner. I’m not surprised I was a bit knackered, it was only my third ride with the club and according to my computer I had added 3mph to my usual speed.
I will be back again but I think this time Group 2 should be Group 2. I have no intention of being pushed home and I think I need to hide up for a few weeks to overcome my embarrassment.
A few weeks ago I took a day off work to ride much of the way across my newly adopted home region of Wallonia – the French speaking bit of Belgium. I was headed south to Huy to watch the Fleche Wallonne cycle race (post here) but what I also wanted was to stretch my cycling boundaries and explore. And in doing so I was able to unravel a previous confusion about the cycling landscape and prove to myself that cycling in Wallonia is indeed upside down.
I also found brilliant riding. I don’t think I have never met anyone who has told me about touring round Belgium so I had no idea what to expect when I came here. A few people had done trips to the WW1 battlefields over in Flanders and I know the odd person who has made the pilgrimage to the big bike races but I just don’t recall “cycle touring in Belgium” being a common discussion point amongst my UK cycling community.
People seeking flat and cyclist friendly riding go to the Netherlands. And to our south France is the biggest cycle touring market in Europe, possibly the world. But as in so many other things dear Belgium gets, well a little bit lost.
On this particular day I experienced two, maybe three very distinctive landscapes which in their own right would provide part of a brilliant tour, both of which show off some of the distinctive elements of Wallonia. It isn’t perfect, cyclists don’t get anywhere near as much help with routes as in Flanders, the Netherlands or France and some of the road surfaces are abominable, but there is no reason for southern Belgium not to be a great cycle touring destination.
Above all else it is completely deserted. Again I have say it, come here fellow cyclists, it is so quiet. A normal Wednesday, a weekday when people are going about their business, the commuter routes into Brussels were as congested as ever and yet I rode for hours and hours on apparently empty roads, hardly seeing a car except when I crossed busier main roads.
Farmers were busy, but apparently nobody else.
And there is a tolerance for cyclists that far exceeds any experience I have had in the UK, and is a complete contrast to Brussels. Maybe it is the lycra, as if lby ooking like a sporty cyclist you seem to spark a certain recognition in the Walloons, but whatever it is I love being treated like a valuable property not an inconvenience.
Upside down country?
I knew that I was heading for the hilly bit of Belgium. Not massive climbs but clearly from descriptions of the Ardennes and the profiles of the bike races it was going to be an area of steep sided hills. Not so different from Brabant Wallon where I live, but probably steeper and bigger. As I like hilly country for cycling I was looking forward to it.
But what I didn’t know much about was the terrain in between, a 50-60km section between the main towns of Wavre and Namur. My previous excursions had touched on flatter terrain and open farmland, but the maps didn’t show any transition to the Ardennes which was a bit odd, I assumed it must start to climb somewhere.
That was almost how it turned out. I had half a ride on gently rolling but exposed farmland. And then I hit the valleys at the very edge of the Ardennes and I was suddenly plunged into steep sided gorges with rock walls and dark stone cottages that could have been plucked out of the English Peak District or the French Perigord Nord.
But the key to understanding the Walloon landscape revealed itself to me as I made that transition. I hit valleys, not hills.
When that realisation dawned suddenly I could make sense of a whole lot of landscapes, not only on that day, but around where I live south of Brussels. I appear to have got this whole region upside down.
I haven’t studied the geology in a text book, so go with me here, it might make sense to a cyclist.
Through Northern France and into Belgium is a wide coastal plan that gradually rises as it heads inland. There are ripples and lumps and bumps, but this is largely flat country. Further north in the “Low Countries” it stays close to sea level however further inland from the coast this plain rises to 100, maybe 150 metres above sea level. In the East in what is now the Ardennes the plain must have been pushed up by geological forces higher and forms a plateau around 700 metres high, but still these are not really mountains thrust up into the landscape, it’s geology was pretty flat when it was laid down.
So there should be no real hills.
Except that there are rivers, which have cut downwards into the soft soils and rocks over thousands of years. So instead of ups, there are downs. Instead of peaks we have flats, when you complete a big climb you end up back on the flat land. It is like the reverse of everywhere I have ever cycled, when you come off a flat section you go down, then you climb back up. That is a right pain if you feel like a bit of freewheeling after a long hill climb!
Where I live in there are many small rivers like La Lasne, Smohain, l’Argentine and La Mazerine, each of which has carved out one of our steep valleys 50-70 metres deep. This makes it feel like constant climbing if you have to travel north to south as I do every time I ride to Brussels.
On my cycle tour across Wallonia I started with a few of these dips and climbs of Brabant Wallon however I was quickly into the an area without significant streams or rivers, so when I climbed out of the last valley to Mont St Guibert there was nearly 50km of gently rolling flat farmland in front of me which will appeal to any lover of cycle tourism on tiny agricultural roads between old farms and sleepy historic villages. Think the Netherlands, think East Anglia, think the Vendee depending on your previous cycling experiences. Dramatic it isn’t, delightful it is. 
The little towns and villages like Chastre, Walhain, Grand Leez, Waret-la-Chausée just slipped by with the spires of their churches and manor houses making attractive punctuation points on the horizon. 
However it is pretty exposed and a nagging headwind really took the edge of my pace, I would really rather have had some variety at times.
I only really understood how this fitted together with the Ardennes this when I reached the valley of the Meuse just east of Namur and a great vista opened out in front of me. But instead of looking up as I had expected to the forthcoming hills I looked across?
Ahead of me the plain could have continued climbing gently and eventually reach the 600 metres of Belgium’s highest point. But it was deeply cut by the many rivers and streams feeding into the Meuse and what I could see from my vantage point was not a series of hills but a tumbling mass of valleys.
The hills of the Ardennes are hills of sorts, but their main shape comes from crossing the valleys, not climbing hills. They do end up a lot bigger than around Brussels because the plain has been rising all the way so the valleys can cut deeper over time, but the much of the landscape is still just open and flat, just that it is 200-300 metres above sea level. This became even clearer when later in my ride I kept climbing out of the valleys and discovering more wide open farming land at the top instead of the peaks of hills I had expected. But the depth of the valleys makes them like another place. The houses are built of stone not brick, the sides are heavily wooded and the villages are just cute as anything, especially as spring blossom was just appearing.
The exception to the cuteness was the valley of the Meuse which forms the boundary of this new area. Initially I dropped very fast and steeply down a lovely side valley alongside a stream, passing mills and cottages in dark stone which reminded immediately of the English Peak District.
At the end it was almost a shock to burst out onto the side of the Meuse. This is a big river, one of the workhorses of Europe and it suffers from its heritage as an industrial canal with big cement works, railways, boat moorings, main roads and a railway line all exploiting its history as transport corridor, especially on the northern bank where the main towns in this section are. The south bank looked a lot pleasanter thank goodness..
I only rode a few kilometres along the only busy road of my day until I could get to the first bridge and across into the quiet countryside again. However I had noticed on the maps that there is a Meuse cycle route and when I rode over the bridge at I could see a flat riverside path winding away into the distance which clearly was the sort of long distance car free route that crosses Europe by the great rivers. So even a third sort of cycle touring was on offer had I wanted just to nip along the river to Huy on flat car free trails.
But I had come for the Ardennes, or at least the edge of the Ardennes, so I had planned a further30km route south of the Meuse and the route of Fleche Wallonne, circling round and come back to Huy from the south, arriving at the top of the Muy de Huy with about 100km under my wheels. I had expected constant climbing and descending but the reality was quite different.
As with the earlier section of the ride I was quickly into a network of minor roads with hardly any traffic on them. South from Namèche I was able to wind my way gradually up a lovely valley past Faulx les Tombes for several kilometres.
I didn’t gain much height but then I turned east and climbed fairly vigorously up Gesves which it turns out is very much a plateau town, looking across high open farmland. I was getting pretty tired at this point and as I was at the top of one of my main climbs of the day I really rather hoped for a nice sweeping decent.
In fact I then had another flattish ride of about 15km northeast on plateau landscape, not what I had expected at all. However I was rewarded when I approached Modave because there was a great decent down and I made my first encounter with the Fleche Wallonne route. A relatively short steep climb out the other side took me back onto the plateau and I was finally working my way in towards Huy. Once again it was deceptive, I appeared to be riding towards a village on a low hill above the farmland. When I encountered the race publicity caravan just south of Huy it seems impossible to imagine they had just come up one of the most famous climbs in cycle racing.
Only when I got to the very top of Mur de Huy could I see that the road effectively “fell off a cliff” falling steeply down through the suburbs and then at the bottom the town is a bustling place by the Meuse. You can get a good impression of the Mur de Huy from here just by looking up at the hill behind the town.
The distinction between the plateau and the valleys is so contrasting it is almost like two worlds, even the architecture and the building materials are different between high and low, as are the farming patterns and woodlands.
Those low traffic volumes, driver respect and contrasting terrains should make Wallonia one of cycle touring’s undiscovered gems instead of something just for the Belgians and a few bike race fans. Maybe it suffers from the fact that it does offer “a bit of everything” because someone describing just one part of my ride on this sunny spring day would had told a completely different story to the next person. The downside is certainly that it isn’t easy to navigate, the theoretical Randonnee á Velo shown on some of my maps have no signposting whatsoever so you need to be confident with a map and reasonably well organised to decide if you wanted to stick to a hilly scenic ride or a meander through the lanes. And 
the Belgians have an extremely relaxed attitude to what constitutes a road for cyclists, in some cases we are talking almost cart track. However that is always preferable to a kilometre of cobbles, that really does knock back your energy and your speed, however it is so much part of the infrastructure there is just no way of knowing until you get there what you are going to be offered. Cycle lanes are almost redundant except by the main roads but they were generally reasonable quality and occasionally real gems.
All in all a brilliant day’s exploration, topped off with beer, frites and bike racing. It doesn’t get much better than that does it? Do come a visit Wallonia, there is something for every sort of cyclist here, even if it is upside down.
I last posted on 30 days of biking back on the 14th of April.
That doesn’t mean I stopped riding, it just means I ran out of steam on the blogging. It’s a great concept and it probably lends itself to the 140 characters of Twitter but I assumed my readers will probably run out of patience if I write “went to the station again” for the 15th time in a month. And it’s not as if I haven’t ridden a bike almost every day since too.
The bigger problem however was that I completely ran out of time to blog, I have had some pretty good content but I haven’t had time to do it justice. So while I am catching up with those posts I have looked back at the second half of the month and pulled out just a few highlights to close out the sequence, even if it is late. Almere and Paris were the travel highlights, but I have already blogged about those.
What was really great was being forced to note as I went along why even daily cycling is so uplifting, especially when you live out in the countryside and spring brings changes almost every day. This has been especially true this year, the late cold winter has compressed spring into a ferocious burst of energy and all of that broke during the 30 days of April.
So glory number one from the end of the month is blossom, bursting out all over.
And number two is the rediscovery of touring. At last the weather has been good enough to do proper touring rides and I managed three or four of those, both local explorations, another club ride with Cyclottignies and my big trip across Wallonia. I ended April a lot fitter than I started it!
Finally there was one other big beneficiary of my determination to ride every day. He is a lot fitter too. When I might have just nipped out for a walk instead Murphy got lots of great cross country rides even after work and we explored a some great new local lanes off the Lasne Nature maps although not without a few barriers.
Anyway I managed to ride every day except one in April, probably more than I would have done without the incentive of the challenge. So Murphy and I thank the 30daysofbiking guys in Minneapolis, great idea. We’ll be back next year.
To see how the rest of the world fared click here
I am in Schweinfurt, just about as close to the centre of Germany as it gets visiting the European education and product development centre for SRAM.
As it is my first time here I before I came briefly asked a couple of German friends about the place and took a quick look on line.
SRAM are here because this is the home of the Sachs bicycle parts business that they bought some years ago, and in turn Sachs is here because this is the absolute heart of German ball bearing manufacturing. A proud industrial heritage, a real engineering based city.
For those of us who are used to old industrial areas being indistinguishable from words like “grim”, “grimy” and “rust-belt” it comes as something of a delight to bike from the hotel to the SRAM site along beautiful water meadows beside the River Main, completely car free almost all the way including the access roads with good cycle paths.
Yes the factories are there, but commuters are mixing with groups of cycle tourists also passing through on longer excursions in a great environment.
There is much here to learn for the industrial towns of many other countries. It is little surprise that German cycling levels continue to rise year on year if even the most unexpected towns can be small slices of cycling delight.
I am assured by ECF board member Frans who delivered a Brompton by trailor to Almere station for me to use today that things are “quiet” because the whole of the Netherlands is on holiday or celebrating to welcome the coronation of the new King.
But it is all a bit scary – I even saw empty cycle parking at a station.
Do not despair gentle reader – here is what we expect – Dutch people being exceptionally normal on bikes on fantastic infrastructure. Enjoy.
I Do Not Despair 