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British Mensa Travel Special Interest Group |
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The
Cycle Path We have gone on cycling holidays for the past few years because: * We like
to think that we are getting fitter as we holiday We quite like to cycle away from home and leave our car(e)s behind us. But it doesn’t always work out that way - we certainly seem to have troubles whenever we try to involve trains and cycles, though we do persist with our attempts in that direction. Here’s our saga of cycles, trains and ferries so far: 2001: We took the train from Aberdeen to Plymouth (without our bikes), stayed in a B&B overnight and caught the daytime ferry to Roscoff where Brittany Bikes picked us up in a chartered coach and took us to their base hotel, arriving around midnight. The hired bikes were very good (British made Orbit with enormous Carradice panniers); the hotels, routes and food were excellent. At the end of the week, the chartered coach returned us to Roscoff for the overnight return ferry. This is where things started to fall down. Brittany
Bikes and Brittany Ferries could only manage to come up with airline seats
on the Ferry, so we spent a night with a rowdy collection of returning
school exchange students. We arrived so early on the Sunday that we had
a couple of hours to spend (with our luggage in tow) waiting for the station
to open. The train ran out of food somewhere around Birmingham, and the
promised resupply at Edinburgh didn’t happen. So, we arrived in Aberdeen
late at night, starved of sleep and food, needing another holiday. We
heartily recommend Brittany Bikes, but getting to them can be a problem.
Most of their customers used to arrive on the Roscoff ferry we described,
but nowadays much of their booking comes through the internet and people
arrive by air or train at distant points in Brittany and have to take
taxis to get to the starting point, or use ferries and cars to drive there. 2003: We decided to abandon the idea of combining trains and cycles and instead took our own bikes on the ferry from Aberdeen to Orkney. We booked our own B&Bs, three places across the island, staying two nights in each. From the travel point of view, this holiday probably worked out the simplest, and we really loved the prehistoric sights/sites on Orkney and could have stayed there longer. The only problem was finding places to eat in the evening in some of the more remote towns and villages - relying in one case on our B&B hosts running us into Stromness by car to find a restaurant. 2004: Cornwall with our own bikes was the intended destination and we booked a series of seven B&Bs direct (breaking the rules we set ourselves on keeping things simple). We left booking the train until two months before, as the tickets aren't available until that time... But, the train tickets for the direct Aberdeen to Penzance service just never came available at any sort of reasonable price, so it turned out to be cheaper in the end to take the bikes in the back of our own car, book two extra nights accommodation in the midlands/northern England on route and pay our first Cornish B&B extra to cover a week’s car parking. All that extra expense was less than the price of two return train tickets! Cornwall was hillier than expected. And we managed to get absolutely soaked one day (this seems to happen wherever we go), but we enjoyed the gardens and managed to find some good vegetarian B&Bs. 2005: Back to taking our own bikes by train and ferry. Again those train bookings went wrong, we tried booking by telephone this time, but the tickets just never appeared and we had to arrange to collect them on the day of travel from the station - cutting things a little bit fine for the nerves. The ferry from Rosyth to Zeebrugge was good but a little expensive, and they had run out of normal cabins in one direction so we ended up paying extra for a luxury cabin (given our previous problems with communal seating on overnight ferries, we decided it was worth the money). We used another travel company, Hooked On Cycling, to organise our accommodation - again, they can organise bike hire if you need it. 2006: Is still in the planning stage as I write this. We are busy with various other things over the summer, so it may well be that we fly to somewhere warmer in the autumn and pick up some hire bikes at our destination. What lessons
have we learned? If taking your bike by train, go to the station and get
your hands on the tickets and cycle reservations well in advance. If you
don’t start or finish at a terminus, check out the type of train
you will be travelling on and where the cycle spaces are so as to make
boarding as easy as possible. Book your own accommodation or use a travel
company - both have their advantages and disadvantages. Take your own
bikes or hire them - again there are pros and cons. In Cornwall with our
own bikes, my “freewheel” jammed on what luckily was a day we
didn't have too much cycling to do - so we spent a couple of hours finding
a cycle shop and getting the unit replaced, when we could have managed
to cycle to an interesting place slightly further afield had we not been
held up. Even if you hire bikes, the repair/recovery service may take
as long to get you sorted. Above all, enjoy your holiday and don’t get too worried if you don’t quite achieve what you set out to do, or have to call the support vehicle to take you the few extra miles. First
published in VISA issue 69 (October 2006) |