Well, 2 years on from our amazing 17-day cycling adventure up the west coast of France (view the blog by clicking on 'view my complete profile'!) and we are still very much cycling as a family.
Hannah has just turned 10 and the twins are 7. In the last year, the twins have joined Hannah and taken up triathlon. They train once a week and are all competing well in their age categories. They are all now racing on drop handle-bar bikes - zooming round courses on tiny, thin road tyres!
I will still be riding my trusty Claude Butler which I got for my 18th Birthday (22 years ago), but I do have a completely new set of Ortlieb panniers as my faithful Karimoor's had started to leak. Adrian took the plunge and became a 'proper' tourer last year by buying my childhood dream bike - the Dawes Super Galaxy - complete with disc brakes... not that I'm jealous or anything! What is it they say about men and bikes (N+1!) - He will be towing the trailer again, but the twins will be carrying all their own gear this time rather than just their front bag and sleeping bag as they did in France. This will enable me to share the weight of the general stuff etc a bit more this time.
We decided not to tour last year as it took so much time to self-plan the French trip that we needed time to think about where to travel to next. I had lots of potential plans for this year... all involving flat cycling in the hot sun-shine... Canal du Midi, parts of the Danube, Brittany/Normandy, Holland, even America!... but unfortunately Adrian did not get the holiday leave from work we needed for a long tour. Reluctant not to lose momentum, we have eventually settled on a few days in the Isle of Wight - so the potential for rain, cold, wind and plenty of hills!!!
Also due to Adrian's restrictive work shifts this year, we have not done as much preparation as we did for France, but the children are older and as we only actually have two longs days of cycling and the rest are all small distances, I hope we will be fine! We did get out last week to cycle part of the Avon and Kennet Canal from Bath up to Bradford-on-Avon and then back through the two-tunnels in a loop. It was 26 miles and the children managed fine.
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