Five ways to GetOutside near you!

Posted on by Debs and Jo (brakesandcakes.org)

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and there’s a lot we’re appreciating about being back in the UK and our local area. I’m really proud to be part of the Ordnanace Survey #GetOutside Champions team this year. Click here to see the team, including Ben Fogle. It’s made me think a lot about my own acitivities outside, and also what everyone else could enjoy about our beautiful country. When the sky is blue, I’m not sure there’s anywhere better, so here’s a few ways to appreciate brilliant Britain…

1. Find your nearest top-rated walk – the recent ITV Top 100 Walks had loads of inspiration for great places to wander, climb, hike or meanders, depending on your required level of exertion. In Leicestershire, our closets walk from the programme is Bradgate Park. We’ve been going there for years and love it. Even when it’s busy, you can still find quieter areas, especially if you walk north of the main path. Wander by the ruins of the old house, a bubbling stream or clamber on the rocks by Old John Tower.

Look out for: Deer, the park run a large herd; views of Leicester, Bardon Hill and surrounds from the highest point.

Access on foot from Anstey or Cropston, bus to Newtown Linford, or three car parks on the edge of the park.
More information: the OS GetOutside site has a full list of all 100 walks here.

2. Walk around your town or city centre in your lunch hour or after work. Anyone can do this. For us it’s Leicester, and if you’re local, you’ll have noticed a fair few changes over the last few years. While we were out of the UK, the city didn’t just go Richard III and Premier League winning crazy. There’s been lots of improvements to pedestrian and bike routes in the city, and a lot of new information boards to tell us all about Leicester’s past. Have a read of these, pop into the Cathedral or hunt out as many blue plaques as you can!

Look out for: Thomas Cook, all the football murals.

Access from anywhere in the city, travel in by foot or bike using the Great Central Way or one of the other National Cycle Network routes. There’s an information board at the train station, which has an impressive frontage.

More information: Look around in your town! Or try your local library.

3. Ride some country roads on your bike. Pick the smallest roads on your map (especially any labelled ‘gated’) and head out. While it’s still chilly aim for a coffee stop somewhere en route. For Leicester this means some of England’s very best cycling in the area around Market Bosworth. That’s right, England’s best – (very) gentle rolling countryside, pretty villages, narrowboats on the Ashby Canal, steam trains on the Battlefield Line. In particular, between Hinckley, Heather and Orton on the Hill there’s a network of small lanes that on a weekend mornings usually have more bikes than cars. Our favourite stop to get warm is Jasper’s in Market Bosworth – probably the best coffee in Leicestershire. Or try some local cheese at the Leicestershire Handmade Cheese Co in Upton. Plenty of pubs around too!

Look out for: Boats going over the aqueduct at Shenton; lots of other cyclists; us!

Access: Pick a sensible cycling route from your area using low traffic roads. If you’re not sure, contact us or your local Breeze/Let’s Ride Leaders for advice. You can also use the British Cycling site to find ride buddies. You could make it easier from the centre of Leicester by popping your bike on the train to Narborough or Hinckley to cycle from there.
More information: Use OS maps online to look for areas with lots of small roads (and your refreshment break).

4. Do a journey by foot that you would usually use other transport for. Being car free, usually it’s a bike ride or train trip to get from Narborough into the centre of Leicester. A few weeks ago I had a look at my OS map (Landranger 140 map fans) and realised I could get right into the centre of the city with very minimal road walking. It took me about 1hr45 mins, so a bit longer than usual. I walked along part of the original Fosse Way (Roman road), through countryside, and along a river. In the 12km ish I only had to walk by a road for about 1km. I had a great time and saw a few things on the way that I’d not noticed from cycling a similar route, like the amazing Aylestone Packhorse Bridge.

Access: If your journey is too long, get a bus or train part of the way, then walk the rest. I’ve now walked from Leicester city centre to Fosse Park a few times and got on the bus from there. I don’t have to walk on the roads at all in that journey!
Planning: Use OS maps online to look for footpaths. Visit your local tourist information to see if they have walk/bike maps for your area.

5. Go to your nearest woodland area or Forestry Commission site. Walking in woods is even good in the rain. There’s plenty to look at and lots to do if you’re out with kids. There’s a number of these in the midlands, most recently we went to the National Forest Cycle Centre at Hick’s Lodge, near Ashby de la Zouch. You can take your own bikes, or hire there. There’s different off road trails depending on how hard you would like to work. Even the most challenging trail there can be done by most riders – you can make it harder by going faster or trying some MTB tricks. We saw a family with a 4 year old cyclists taking it on last week – they just had more rests!


Everyone will have ideas about how they can get outside more in their local area. I suppose the bottom line is – just do it!

Back in the saddle in Latvia

Posted on by Debs and Jo (brakesandcakes.org)

After our unplanned return from China and two months at home we were itching to get back on the road, so we had planned a final European loop to get us to Helsinki, from where we would ride home, completing the round the world cycle trip. It is now a few weeks since we pedalled away from Measham for the second time. As with our initial departure in September 2015 we were aiming for the Harwich-Hook of Holland ferry, and as the first time, we rode in glorious sunshine through beautiful English countryside. There really is no better place to ride when the sun shines. We mainly followed national cycle routes on small country lanes, though with a few more hills than our out of practice legs and lungs would have liked.

An overnight ferry (full of other cyclists, none of whom spoke to us – strange lot us Brits are) landed us in the Netherlands at 8am on Debs’ birthday. What better way to celebrate than to stock up on pastries at Lidl and head to the beach for a birthday breakfast. The sun was still shining, the wind was behind us and we were back on the best cycle paths in the world (not confirmed) surrounded by elderly Dutch cyclists on their upright bikes. The paths are almost totally flat, but can have a short steep(ish) incline and then drop at times. On one of these, one of our Dutch cycling friends warned us that “there is about another ten of these steep hills on this path ahead”… a Dutch steep hill that is. Two or three hard pedal strokes and you are up and over the peak. Rocky Mountains they are not. We were pleased to be back in Europe.

We had a lot of time on the ferry

A short ride to Dan Haag (we will be back…) and four trains later we were in the port of Travemunde on the north east coast of Germany, via Hamburg where we stayed with a friend for a couple of nights. The ferry from would take us to Leipaja in Latvia and we were mostly in the company of truck drivers. We settled in with a Lidl picnic and enjoyed the sunset from the boat. It was the smoothest sailing I have ever experienced. A mere 28 hours later we were in Latvia. 


As we arrived at 10pm I had booked a cheap hotel room to save us having to “ride around a strange town in the dark” looking for a place to stay. Rolling off the ferry at 10.15 pm, the sun was still above the horizon. We were five days from midsummer and the days were long. Ah well. The Sport Hotel was the bargain of the century at only €14 for the biggest room ever, with the answer to every British cyclists dreams, an electric kettle. There was even a sofa. Welcome to Latvia.

Shops were sometimes hard to spot. Few windows. The signs helped at this one.

Finally we were back in the saddle, and set off the next morning with no idea what to expect from Latvia and no real plan, other than “ride to Estonia”. Riding up the coast seemed a good place to start, without realising we were apparently following a Eurovelo route (though we are a little sceptical of some of their “routes” that are often just someone’s nice idea) and before we’d even left town we saw five other touring cyclists. That’s more than we saw in the whole five months in Europe at the start of our trip. Cycling in the summer is more popular than the winter then. 

Leipaja had a few sights including a very shiny Russian Orthodox Cathedral and a soviet-era prison but soon we were on the open road and navigating by keeping the sea on our left. The sun was shining but our legs were weary from riding the loaded bikes for the first time in a couple of months. Ride all you like at home but nothing prepares you for carrying the weight of the bags. The first night in the tent since February was strange, it didn’t get properly dark at all so we had to use our buffs as a blindfold to give the illusion of night time. After a night camping by the sea we turned inland and with the help of an amazing tailwind that we savoured every minute of – as most of this leg will be riding west into the wind – we were in Riga two days later. Latvia was flat, green, and mostly well kept. Towns had attractive parks, old wooden buildings, castles and were very pleasant indeed. There was the odd soviet style concrete tower block but not as many as we had expected. 

Making friends with the locals.

It was a rainy morning’s ride to Riga, and included a comedy moment of hiding in a bus shelter when the rain was particularly fierce only to be completely soaked by a truck riding through a huge puddle/lake that had formed next to the kerb. By the time we arrived in the picturesque capital the sun was shining again. Riga is mostly known these days as a stag party destination thanks to Ryanair and cheap beer, but the old style buildings are ornate and the different pastel colours makes the whole place very easy on the eye. I say old style because most of the city was destroyed during WW2 and has since been rebuilt to look old. It’s actually pretty compact, we had a day to walk around but found that we had covered most of the old town in a few hours. Including sampling a couple of bakery treats.

Great fancy buildings in Riga
Great fancy cakes in Riga

Luckily we had arrived on party weekend. Midsummer, or ligo (pronounced leegwa, strangely) in Latvia, is celebrated on 23rd June and is said to be bigger than Christmas. Though most people celebrate by heading out into the countryside, lighting fires and drinking all night, there was a music festival in the city which had a nice atmosphere, even if it was like being in the middle of the Eurovision Song Contest. Latvian pop music is not to our taste. People were drinking and dancing, we saw at least three people fall over they were so drunk, and at one point there was a circle of women close to us who were all at least six feet tall. Apparently Latvian women are the tallest in the world, and on that evidence, I wouldn’t argue against it. 

An annoying-to-navigate ride out of Riga (as most cities are) had us riding up the coast towards Estonia. Our mistrust of the Eurovelo bike route deepened as the bike signs seemed to direct us into the sea – it actually went along the beach for 6kms. The sand was mostly hard packed but the bikes are so heavy it was tough going. Once off the beach the rain returned and we hung out at our usual bus shelter, watching as youngsters stumbled past drinking and singing, the beach party clearly rained off but not their enthusiasm. It was still the holiday weekend and we pulled in to a campsite that evening to find groups of Latvians keeping the fires burning and the alcohol flowing. One guy could speak fairly good English so spoke to us at length about immigration policies (“your mayor, she doesn’t want Eastern Europeans in the country but she lets all the Muslims in”; “do you see any brown people in Latvia? No, we kill them”) before rejoining the party. We fell asleep to the soothing sound of more Latvian tunes, hoping that when we crossed the border into Estonia the next morning the music as well as the weather would improve. I’m not sure I can ever watch Eurovision again.


Latvia had been a nice return to the cycling lifestyle. Flat, easy camping, cheap food, tailwinds. It was good to be back on the bikes again, although I found the first few days quite tough mentally. I had optimistically assumed that normal life would fall back into place as soon as we were cycling again, but in reality everything had changed and it was hard to focus on what we were doing rather than what we would have been doing if we hadn’t had to return home from China. Cycling also gives you a lot of time to think – I had spent most of my time at home busy and suddenly my mind was empty and I thought a lot about my dad and what had happened over the past two months. Even though I often felt sad, I knew it was the right thing to be back cycling and finishing the trip off in the best way we could.
Thanks to: Svenja, David and Zane.

An update and a plan

Posted on by Debs and Jo (brakesandcakes.org)

Happy Sunday morning. I’m enjoying mine with a brew and smug-feeling inducing carrot, apple and cinnamon porridge in my parents’ kitchen in Leicestershire. If I’d had to predict 2 months ago where I would be on June 11th my answer would have been west of Stockholm, but east of Copenhagen. Not much has really gone to plan in the last 7 weeks and for that reason the blog is now the most behind it has ever been. Jo will be writing to explain more about all of that, and i’ll be trying to catch up on the so far ignored bits of Thailand and Laos.

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Sharing the road in Laos

It has been good to have the chance to see lots of family and friends during our return to the UK. Being car-less that has meant we have spent quite a bit of time doing the same as being on tour. Riding bikes with panniers, staying only one night at various friends/family then going somewhere else, navigating new routes to get there. There’s been some brilliant cycling in Leicestershire, as enjoyable as anywhere in the world, so if you’re local, get out and explore some of the lovely roads. The area between Measham and Hinckley is especially good, pick the smallest roads and you will pretty much only see other cyclists, and loads of them.

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Lovely Leicestershire roads, nr. Shenton

Despite the fun at home, we very much feel that we need to finish (Finnish) the trip off properly, or as close to ‘properly’ as we can. There was never a fixed route for the ride, but 18000 miles was always in mind as a minimum distance – it’s what Guinness count as an around the world ride. Although we have not succeeded in our aim to cross Asia overland (we were always going to have some train help), we were pretty clear on still reaching this total. To make life easier with visas (and Jo’s almost full passport) we decided to restrict this final leg of the journey to Europe. Unlike the UK government, this week we made a plan for how we would tackle it.

If the original route had worked out, we would have arrived in Helsinki by ferry and ridden home. So we could fly to Helsinki, but that seems a little dull/easy/annoying with bike boxes. Instead, here’s a rough outline. When I say rough outline, I mean, here’s all of our planning to date:

Ferry Harwich-Hook of Holland : Ride to The Hague : Eat Dutch apple cake : Train from the Hague-Hamburg : Ride to Travemunde : Ferry to Latvia (I know, definitely NOT in the original trip schedule) : Ride to Tallinn, Estonia via Riga : Ferry Tallinn-Helsinki : Ride home from Helsinki.

Seems reasonable to me, though the menus need more work. We don’t have to fly and get two Brucie Bonus capital cities to visit. There’s at least 3 overnight ferries for pretending to be in an Agatha Christie novel. It should take about 7-8 weeks, back in time for the incredibly early school term start in Leicestershire, and takes us comfortably over the magic 18,000. Route advice always welcome if you have knowledge of the area.

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But which way is Finland?

Once again we have only a few days to go, and virtually nothing ready. Seriously. We currently don’t have a tent –  somehow the poles got left in China. Yes, I agree, it is a wonder we got so far unsupervised. Friends should feel relieved at this point that for this trip we are not moving out of a house. You will not be required to install carbon monoxide detectors, search through piles of our disorganised paperwork, or felt the shed roof. This time we thank you instead for driving out of your way to see us, giving us places to stay, taking us to train stations, squeezing bikes in your cars and generally being kind and wonderful during the return we didn’t plan for.

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One of the many Leicestershire – N Yorks train trips. Some train bike racks are brill. This is one is rubbish.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Great British Send-Off

Posted on by Debs and Jo (brakesandcakes.org)

Not a soggy bottom in sight: Friday 25th – Weds 30th Sept

getting ready for the first ride
getting ready for the first ride

As we prepared to leave British shores the UK gave it’s all to show us what we were leaving behind. Thanks to so many of our friends, colleagues, students and family who made the effort to fit into our plans in those last few days. The weather was amazing, Leicestershire looked just lovely as we set off on the the first (short) ride from Measham to Hinckley on Sunday afternoon.

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The next morning was equal to it, with beautiful clear blue skies, rolling green hills, delightfully English villages and plenty of picnic spots to enjoy snacks. Northampton itself was a less fun meander along random cycle routes (“weren’t we just over there a minute ago?!”) – it was fortunate that Sarah our extra team member for the day had prepared additional sandwiches to counteract the challenge.

It was great to see friends for a final goodbye in Stewartby and the 110km day put Kelvedon (Debs’ Aunt and Uncle) in touching distance for Tuesday.

Make sure there are stiff peaks…

Who knew Hertfordshire was so hilly? We didn’t, and it really was. It was also our second day of headwind, and the loaded bikes felt pretty heavy. Thanks to Trax Cycles of Buntingford, who helped swapped Debs’ pedals and made the bags just a little bit lighter. Herts and Essex both had some great cycle routes, including the Flitch trail, named for the Flitch Trials of Dunmow, where the winning couple are awarded a side (flitch) of bacon if they can prove they have not argued for a year and a day. It can be assumed that none of the winners have tried to follow the Flitch trail through Dunmow itself, which was not the relaxed rail trail present either side.

Sadly, every week, someone has to say goodbye…

image(Bake-off spoiler alert) This week it was Flora and us (not that we found that out until later, see Belgium). Our Kelvedon family helped us carb-load for future pedalling and we hit Harwich for the overnight ferry. If you haven’t been on one, this is great fun, as you can pretend to be in an Agatha Christie novel and you get to sleep in a little cabin. Even better, you wake up in a new place with the whole day ahead of you. Welkom!