Thursday 11th May 2023 I probably wouldn’t have thought about putting this relatively gentle cycling route together if it wasn’t for its fascinating historical context explained below. Because there are lengthy urban sections however, it’s advisable to avoid rush hours and school runs. Living in Durham, I chose to start closest to home, on the …
Thursday 4th May 2023 There was a time when being in the North Pennines around Alston Moor would mean hard toil and long hours – sometimes in the face of the most extreme English weather. Today any physical hardship is likely to be self-imposed, purely recreational and timed carefully to fit in with the good …
Thursday 3rd September 2020 Although we’d put about three thousand miles on the tandem in 2019 including a 200-mile single day event, short tours in Holland and Belgium and a 3-week camping tour of the Dordogne, Lot and Tarn regions of France, a knee injury had curtailed much of Diane’s cycling in 2020 resulting in …
Friday, 24th April 2020 If you’ve never heard of County Durham sculptor Ray Lonsdale and you live in the North East of England, you might be familiar with Tommy, a sombre, oversized sculpture of a war-weary soldier which dominates Terrace Green on the promenade at Seaham Harbour. Since it was installed in 2014, Ray’s work …
Saturday, 22nd June 2019 On the longest day this year, Diane and I entered our first event on the tandem that we bought in October last year (2018) from JD Tandems in Gargrave near Skipton, North Yorkshire. The event was Chase the Sun’s inaugural Northern UK cycle tour (it’s not a race, nor is it …
Sunday, 21st July 2019 As part of the conditioning process for an upcoming cycling holiday to France we felt it might be worthwhile taking the tandem around the Otterburn military training area in the heart of the Northumberland National Park. We’d tried the same route the weekend before but had only got as far as …
