FREEDOM

Have you ever dreamed of how it might feel to be totally FREE?! No baggage, no responsibilities, no worries or deadlines to meet, no-one demanding anything of you. Totally free and liberated to choose what happens next…

Freedom is a topic that’s been on my mind a lot lately, as here in the UK, and many other places around the world, my generation has often taken our freedoms very much for granted.

The closest i’ve ever come to that feeling has been on long distance bikes rides. Carrying only the essentials, with no agenda other than to reach a resting place and find a big plate of hot food, pumped full of endorphins from the exertion (no wonder the ‘hardest’ days are also the best days) and surrounded by beautiful, often dramatic, nature.

With this in mind, I’d like to take you on a journey, back to a time when spontaneity was the order of the day. For me, this was almost a decade ago before kids arrived on the scene, when I could hop on a plane at short notice and head off on an adventure (almost) whenever it felt right. Maybe you lead a spontaneous lifestyle? Although most recently, as a result of COVID, most of us have felt what it’s like to be grounded, whether we like it or not.

Anyway, on with the story…at this particular time I was living in London, with no real ties, when a friend called to say “Hey, I have an idea! Let’s cycle from San Francisco to Los Angeles!” Now i’d been to LA before but I had no real sense of the distance involved (I suspected, knowing my friend there was a girl somewhere along the way) and as a short sighted Brit living on a tiny island in the North Atlantic, assumed that cycling between two cities in the same state would be very manageable.

I should also mention that I wasn’t much of a road cyclist in those days, I was mostly cruising around the streets of London on my fixie (a single gear bike favoured by couriers for navigating the fairly flat city streets) and had a long forgotten history of BMX’ing as a child of the Eighties (think Stranger Things if you subscribe to Netflix). In other words, I was shockingly short of miles in the saddle, especially considering the idea at hand…but regardless, I thought it sounded like a great adventure.

As for trip planning and navigation, well there wasn’t a great deal of preparation. To save weight we tore twenty pages out of the middle of a California guide book, smart phones existed but Google maps & international data roaming weren’t so commonly used, otherwise we intended to follow our noses. Fortunately, as we’d chosen the Pacific Coast Highway, it was going to be reasonably straight forward to stay on track, other than when we needed to navigate through towns and cities on route.

We booked hotels to break up what would be an 800 km ride into six days. Given the minimalist approach to planning, it turned out some days were A LOT longer than others and we had no sense at all of how much climbing we would face, the early days of smart phones left a lot more to the imagination. Of course, these days all these questions are more quickly and easily answered with technology.

My fixie wasn’t going to cut it through the hills of California, so I borrowed a lightweight, carbon fibre road bike, we enlisted another friend for the trip to make us three, spent a trivial amount of time training (a couples of laps around Richmond Park at the most), and jumped on a plane to the west coast of the US. Just like that.

The places we saw and the people we met along the ride are far too many to mention; the white sands of Carmel on the Monterey Peninsula, epic Pacific cliffside roads through Big Sur around the frequently photographed Bixby Bridge, thousands of acres of farmland and vineyards, Santa Barbara’s Spanish colonial boulevards, surfers and skaters living their dream in Malibu and so much more…

The most wonderful part of arriving in all these places on a bike is that its such an immersive and exhilarating experience, there’s no screen between you and the environment, you’re in it and you really feel it. It really was an epic ride and, even though the Pacific Coast Highway is firmly on the tourist trail, one the greatest journey’s i’ve ever made.

Despite a strong argument for under-planning and leaving as much as possible to the imagination, we decided to bring a little more science to our next cycle tour and this time we stayed a little closer to home.

Pisa to Saint Tropez would combine two of our favourite countries; Italy and France, and some of the most iconic coastlines in Southern Europe. Much like the ‘PCH’ through California, the SS1 would get us most of the way, however we knew first hand that European road networks are more complicated and less predictable than the more recently laid tarmac in the US. So we forced ourselves to think a little harder about the route and put in the time to research the best places to stay.

Even so, cycling navigation still wasn’t a fully formed art and we needed pulled together dozens of Google screen shots and type out the turns into what would become affectionately known as “the document”. It was a little rough and ready by today’s standards, and not entirely accurate, but what we didn’t know, we made up as we went along. Needless to say, it was another great ride and another epic bike tour, we were hooked and we certainly felt FREE!

Since then, we’ve refined our approach every year. the preparation and planning has become more sophisticated and we’ve been more discerning when choosing the places to rest and refuel. you could argue that some of the adventure has been lost by reducing the chance of an unintended detour and having every turn indicated by GPS, and we’d have to agree. That said, cycle tours are always a great adventure, whenever you go somewhere new, you’re entirely immersed in the environment and at the mercy of the weather. It’s exhilarating, sometimes a little frightening, always challenging and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

As we slowly but surely make our way out of lockdown, I for one intend to make a point of not taking my freedoms for granted. Since California we’ve been on several long distance cycle rides and have many more ideas for routes to explore in the future. I will make sure that each time we go, we celebrate our freedom and consider how fortunate we are to be able to travel so freely, as so many people around the world cannot with or without the restrictions of Covid.

There’s a lot to be said for just grabbing your gear, loading it onto your bike and heading out without over-thinking and over-planning every detail. Technology has brought us so much information, access and a degree of control over our experiences that we have certainly lost a sense of how to allow an adventure to simply unfold.

Of course, taking a few precautionary measures to ensure your safety is well advised; leave your itinerary with someone not on the journey, book accommodation or at least identify campsites ahead of time, don’t overstretch yourself and never run out of water or cash. There’s a great sense of freedom and adventure when you’re not bound to a tight schedule.

The key is not to think too hard about it, if we can resist the temptation to measure every inch of the journey we gain so much more from the unexpected by leaving ourselves open to whatever we find. And ultimately, this is the 21st century so we can at least fall back on technology to get us out of the occasional tight corner, should a problem arise.

I really hope you love these rides as much as we have discovering them. The route forward is ever evolving, we’re always learning and we’d love to hear your stories too.