Tag Archives: camping

Bikepacking – A New Bike Camping Adventure?

Bikepacking? What?

I think they used to call it “cycle touring“. According to bikepacking.net, the short answer is that it’s “backpacking with a bike“.

Why?

As a family, we spend our main holidays camping.  For us five, this means an 8-berth tent with separate bedrooms and lots of home comforts: electricity; a fridge; lighting; a heater; air beds; multiple changes of clothes; body boards; kits; inflatable dinghy…

We love our holidays.  But we’ve been thinking.

If my Other Half and myself want to go somewhere, an 8-berth tent is a bit much. So, we book into a hotel. At more cost than we really need to spend.  If my boy and I want to go exploring and doing some Father-Son bonding without the car, we couldn’t, to put it bluntly.

How?

I picked up a bunch of end-of-season bargains at Go Outdoors and added a few other bits so that we now have a full bikepacking kit.

A special note of thanks goes to Toby, from whose blog I won the panniers, saving us a small fortune.

As well as what you can see here, we’ve got a small gas burner; first aid kit; boy’s sleeping bag; mess tins and we’ll carry some food with us (most likely of the noodles-in-a-pot variety). We’ll head out with multiple thin layers; buffs; gloves and some baby wipes.

When? Where?

I’m kicking myself that the boy & me didn’t go on Saturday night for a dry run. The forecast was for horrible winds so we chickened out. As it happens, it was a warm, dry and fairly calm night. Ah well.

The updated plan is to have a short ride to Hollingworth Lake where there’s a little camp site for our first outing.  Then once we’re sure we’ve got what we need, we can graduate to something a little less organised and a little more wild.

So?

Do you think we’ve forgotten anything important?  I hope not.

In Dorset?

Yes, I’d recommend it to anyone.

Family Holiday Fun

We spent a week in a field in Dorset recently, staying at a Camping & Caravanning Club site a few minutes from the coast in Charmouth.

The site was excellent. Clean, welcoming, lovely big pitches with good drainage (a must in the British summertime), well-equipped shower blocks and a well-stocked shop.  As a family, we enjoyed 7 nights of restful fun, helped by an almost complete lack of 3G signal which prevented me from checking in on work emails! 🙂

Home

Home

From a cyclist’s point of view, let me tell you that Dorset is hilly.  Surprisingly hilly.  I took a brief excursion onto the Sustrans NCN2 past Monkton Wyld, just behind the camp site, and was alarmed by the steep drop, which led me to abandon my plans to ride to Bridport and back.  Instead, I turned back after a mile and a half and picked a different, flat loop which circled the site in a nice easy 5 miler.  Wimped out.

But not before dropping my bike accidentally and smashing my rear light off.  Two cable ties later it looks as good as new.

Lyme Regis

Lyme Regis is silly steep.  It’s basically a drop down to the coast with streets scattered along the hillside.  The roads are almost impossible to drive safely, so it’s a “point, hope and squint” experience!  In the end, I parked a little higher in the town and walked the family down towards the beach, vowing never to return.

But return I did. It’s such a pretty place once you take it in away from the car.  The day after our first visit, we went back for a lovely Italian meal and loved it.  We stayed so late that they were cleaning up around us and presented us with complimentary Limoncellos by way of an apology.  Limoncello’s lovely, once you get over the thought that it’s like drinking Flash kitchen floor cleaner.

 

Lyme Regis

Lyme Regis, very pretty

Cycling in Devon

The Dorset coast isn’t really made for cycling.  Far too hilly for an unfit bloke on an MTB plus a family of 4 other fairweather cyclists.  So, we took a 45 minute drive West and headed to a river basin in Devon.

However, we bought a fantastic little £5 Treasure Trails guide booklet for a ride around the river Exe and the Exeter Ship Canal which took us on an excellent 11 mile loop of around 3 hours.  The booklet presents a sort of treasure hunt, where you solve a puzzle by completing 21 clues.  Then you can submit your answer to be entered into a prize draw.

 

Treasure Trail Around Exeter

Treasure Trail Around Exeter

The Treasure Trails books cover walking and cycling, and can be bought for most areas in the UK.  What a brilliant little idea!  Learn more about them here.

Hopefully I’ll post more about our adventures in the next few days, but I hope this gives you a taster.  If you like the idea of the trails, please buy one and give it a try – I can’t recommend them highly enough if your kids have a short attention span! 🙂

Tell ’em Phill sent you.

Norfolk & Fun.

Sorry about the brief hiatus.  I’ve been away and not blogging, on account of living in a field and all that.

Sandringham Sunshine

While the North West enjoyed the weather that it’s famous for (i.e. bobbins), we headed to Norfolk, to camp within the grounds of Sandringham, where the Royal family spend 10 weeks each year and eat their Christmas dinner together.  To sum up the week in one sentence, it was sunny; relaxed; idyllic; woody; tasty; splashy; barbecuey; pretty and fun.

The #August150 Update

As I write, 40 people are featured on the August150 spreadsheet.  8 have already finished, another 3 have done more than two-thirds of the miles and 29 people have logged some miles.  If you want to join in, let me know and I’ll tell you how.  Basically, I need the email address you use for Google, and you’re in!

Personally, my Norfolk week didn’t go well in August 150 terms.  We only got one ride out really, aside from a couple of trips to the shop.  On the day we’d planned a good explore, N1S’s bike inexplicable exploded whilst leaning against a fence.  On closer inspection, it seems I’d pumped the tyre up too hard and an errant spoke was causing a stress point against the rim.  When he’d done a little lap around the site, the warmth and pressure had got up and then the tyre simply went “BANG! PFFFFT!” once the bike was rested.  Grrrr.  One failed repair and a trip to Halfords later, the bike was ok but our time was gone.

We did get a ride along NCN Route 1 later in the week though.  It’s gorgeous.  It got me thinking: We’ve rode along NCN1 now, and I live on NCN66 – that leaves 64 routes.  Too many.  So I might look into which routes I could travel to within a day from mine and try to tick a bunch of those off – what d’you think?  Speaking of canals (I know I wasn’t but NCN66 is along Rochdale Canal a good slug of the way), have you seen LouLouK’s blog about her ride along the Leeds-Liverpool canal?  You should – it’s an inspiration to anyone who thinks they might not be able to get some big riding done.

Holiday Diabetes

Just a brief note here.  In the past, I’ve had some crashing hypos whilst on holiday.  The trouble with Type 1 diabetes is that I tend to dose myself up with the same amount of insulin most days, but on holiday you do loads more exercise by stealth.  By stealth, I mean that you don’t realise.

Then what happens is that you wake up at night with crazily low blood sugars, doing weird things and amusing/terrifying your loved ones.  Well, I’ve found the secret: test more!  By taking my glucose monitor and simply doing the finger prick tests more often, I was able to avoid any silly hypos this holiday.  In fact, my only low was on the last day, when packing up took us way past lunchtime.  A quick Cadbury’s Twirl and I was back on track!  Sorted 🙂  Feel better, go longer, be safer, test more.

That’s all for today, save these few photos of our lovely break.

I’m hoping to get out for a ride with Jon tomorrow evening, so I might make a start on some proper miles at long last – maybe too late for the August 150, but fingers crossed I might just do it!

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