Travel Blog
The Pyrenees Pass by Pass: A Five-Day Traverse
The Pyrenees are different from the Alps. Wilder, less groomed, with a particular quality of emptiness on the high passes that the more touristic Alpine cols rarely achieve. Our five-day traverse from Hendaye on the Atlantic coast to Banyuls-sur-Mer on the Mediterranean was the most complete cycling journey I have ever undertaken.
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Mont Ventoux: The Lonely Mountain That Haunts Every Cyclist
Mont Ventoux does not look like a mountain that can hurt you. From the plains of the Luberon, it rises as a white dome above the olive groves — almost gentle-looking, almost approachable. This is a lie. Ventoux is, by reputation and by reality, the cruellest mountain in European cycling, and I say that as someone who rode it three times in a single day.
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Swiss Alpine Roads: Immaculate Surfaces Through the Roof of Europe
Switzerland charges you for everything — the food, the hotels, the cable cars — and delivers corresponding value in return. The roads in particular are extraordinary: swept, smooth, edged with precision, maintained to a standard that makes British tarmac feel like a theoretical concept. For a cyclist, this is paradise measured in francs.
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From Couch to Alps: My Honest First Cycling Holiday Diary
Twelve months ago I owned a bike I had not ridden in three years. It hung from hooks in my garage, covered in a thin layer of optimism and a thicker one of dust. Then I booked a cycling holiday in the Alps and gave myself six months to become someone who could survive it. This is what actually happened.
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Tuscany by Two Wheels: Chianti, Olive Groves and Impossible Beauty
Tuscany is where cycling becomes art. The roads — the famous white gravel strade bianche, the cypress-lined lanes, the hilltop towns connected by vertiginous descents — were not built for bikes, but they seem, in retrospect, to have been designed for them. I rode here for a week in April and have spent the months since working out how to go back.
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