- It’s a holiday: have fun. It’s a holiday not an endurance test: take it at your pace, do what you enjoy and try not to get too obsessed with the Average Speed on your odometer. OK, a little bit obsessed, but not TOO obsessed… Plan your holiday with fun in mind. You don’t need to prove anything to anyone, especially yourself. Anyone strapping a few bags to their bike and pedalling away to the horizon is automatically amazing, however long or fast they go or how many hills they climb. Amazing and faintly ridiculous as well, so don’t take it too seriously. The test is whether when you come back from holiday, you want to do it again.
- Take your time to find out what you enjoy. There is no set rule for how far you have to ride each day or how much to climb: start gently and build up to your comfort level. From time to time, I ride over 100km in a day because I need to connect between good places to sleep or explore, but I have realised that my ideal distance is 60-80km: the extra 20k starts to drag. But you might be different: the only way is to find out. If you don’t enjoy it, put it down as good experience and a good dinner party story (see Rule 3 below). Obey Rule 1 at all times.
- Don’t be afraid to step outside your comfort zone and have a bit of adventure. I know: you could be run over in a tunnel, zapped by a bolt of lightning, bitten repeatedly by rabid dogs, shaven by a crazy driver, robbed by bandits, blown by a freak wind into a ravine where no one will find you for decades. But you won’t be. And if you spend your life worrying about all this, there is a far greater risk that you will miss out on the experiences of a lifetime. And statistically you are at far greater danger closest to home. So chill out and get out there. At best, it can be wonderful, but even the moments that seem awful at the time can later seem quite amusing. There is a mathematical equation showing this: Potentially life-threatening incident + Time + Life not actually ending = Great Dinner Party Story or PLTI + t + LNAE = GDPS. (Or LNAE = GDPS – (PLTI+t) or something and OK it’s not really mathematical but…) And OK, there are some days on the bike which remain awful and things go wrong, but you just have to suck them up as long as for the majority of your trip, Rule 1 above applies.
- Mix it up. Sure you can spend two weeks cycling along the Danube with hardly a hill to disturb you and staying at non-descript hotels every night. But where’s the fun? After a few days, you’ll get bored of yet more river and blasé about yet another ruined castle. Mix it up: some days on the flat, some days in the hills, some days on the coast. The same with accommodation: a few super comfortable places especially for the days when you have ridden crazy distances, a few AirBnBs or WarmShowers, a few family-run guest houses. It is these places that can make the trip super-memorable: in Lithuania, I stayed in an apartment in a block of flats on the edge of nowhere, a converted barn on the edge of a farmhouse where I fell asleep to the sound of falling horse chestnuts, and a super chic hotel among others. (Ignore all this if it contravenes Rule 2 and you really are a dullard for whom experience has told you that two weeks of relentless river and repetitive castles floats your monochrome boat.)
- Plan your trip around the weather. The Danube in Hungary can be beautiful – for a few days, see Rule 4 above – but in mid-August, with temperatures in the upper thirties celsius and the humidity index going through the roof? I tried it: I could hardly see for the sweat. Parts of me sweated that had never sweated before. It was like being in an outdoors sauna with marginally fewer fat naked men. If you need to travel in August and Rule 2 tells you that you prefer cycling in non-sauna conditions and with fewer fat naked men: go north to Scandinavia, Scotland or the Baltics. If you want to go in April or May, go south to the Med. Weather will always be unpredictable – I got very cold in Crete in late April – but you should maximise your chances of great days of riding. Conversely if you have a region in mind and have some flexibility in the timing of your holiday, adjust the timing to the weather.
- Be flexible over your exact route and have options. OK: I book hotels ahead so that I am pretty much fixed into getting from A to B on a given day (though I can use the rest days – see Rule 7 below – as a buffer in case of emergency) but I have learnt to plan for different routes for a given day and to be ready to listen to local advice. Last year in Albania, it didn’t look as though I had much choice of roads to Elbasan: just a dusty cart track for most of the ride. I was staying with a friend who told me to take another route, which didn’t even appear on any maps. I said “But it doesn’t exist.” “Look, you idiot. How do you think I drove here from Tirana? Just turn right at the roundabout outside Kucove.” Sadly the smug git was right: it was a wonderful brand new road. And he hasn’t stopped reminding me since.
- Take rest days. Rule 1 applies: it’s a damn holiday. Last year, I met an American cycling from Crete right along the Mediterranean coast to Barcelona. He had to make big distances every day to be there in time for his return flight. And I thought “What a shame.” To pass through great towns and not have the time to appreciate them fully. To feel that you have to be on the go every day. Every 3-5 days, have a day off the bike to sleep, relax and really appreciate a place: be it a beautiful town or a nice stretch of coast or mountains. And have a few glasses of wine for purely medicinal purposes. When you get back on the bike the next day, you will be all the happier.
- Embrace the tech: buy a bike GPS to give you turn-by-turn instructions and measure your heartbeat when the doggies chase you. Buy an e-reader to save weight on books. Take your iPhone with all your booking details, the weather forecast and the ability to call people in an emergency. Go wild and get a GoPro to capture your stunningly boring footage of you pedalling slowly up a hill or the bobbing arse of your cycling companion. I know: there are some people out there who still love the feel of paper and the ability to read an Ordnance Survey map and remember what the triangle with a dot in it means. These are the same kinds of losers who still buy cars without an automatic gearbox “because manual is the real driving”. These are the people who I pass during torrential rainstorms, huddled over their disintegrating maps while trying to figure out which way is magnetic North and whether they missed the key turning to their destination. You don’t need this. Any affordable tech that helps meet Rule 1 is a GOOD THING.
- Disconnect. Bring your iPhone but don’t be hooked to it. Take a few weeks off Facebook, Instagram, your boss at work and the news: you will feel much better and they will all miraculously survive without you. Live in the moment, not off the screen. If your boss or your family need to contact you in an emergency, they will. If World War 3 starts, you will find out pretty quickly. And don’t worry about missing that cute cat video: there will be another soon.
- Pack light but pack comfortably. Yes, you don’t want to be lugging needless weight up hills. But Rule 1 also applies: it’s a holiday so cut yourself a bit of slack especially in the clothes department. Taking three pairs of bike shorts and three bike jerseys will mean that you don’t need to spend every night washing them or fret if they haven’t dried by the morning. The same applies for clothes off the bike: pack something classy that you can wear to a nice restaurant, but also some T-shirts or shorts for that day off at the beach or hiking. After a hard ride getting muddy and sweaty, it will do a wonder for your morale to shower and head out to dinner looking classy. Anything that looks good even after it has spent a day rolled up in a bike bag like a cotton jacket or shirt will be ideal.
- Indulge yourself. Your body is a temple. The gods of that temple demand copious offerings of sausages, bacon, chips, ham, cheese, cheeseburgers, roast chicken, roast lamb, prawns, squid, more chips, crisps, roasted peanuts, chocolate, Haribo – the fuel of champions – toffee, cake, croissants, currant buns, Danish pastries, cinnamon buns, apfel strudel, ice cream, possibly some more chips, why not? mayonnaise, ketchup, pickled gherkins, chips chips chips all washed down with beer, wine, cider, raki, vodka, tsipouro or whatever the local firewater is. You must obey or the gods will be full of wrath. They will send you thunderstorms, torrential rain, floods, wind that is always in your face, sandy tracks, muddy trenches, roads so bumpy that you need a lifetime’s supply of haemorrhoid cream to recover, mosquitoes, horse flies, idiot flies, mad scowling dogs and mad scowling drivers. You have been warned: respect the temple. And eat some more chips. The gods of your temple will be pleased.
- Linger. This is the most important. There can be a temptation to simply cycle from place to place without stopping. Yes, the journey is the point, but don’t miss the moment. Remember to stop and take a look and simply appreciate the scenery or watch the world go by from a cafe table. Those will end up being the moments that you will remember the most afterwards. And then eat some chips to celebrate.
What do you think? Sensible or complete nonsense? Let me know.
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