Can We Ride There?

The bicycle is my favourite means of transport.  Over the last few years it has become my default way of getting somewhere.  Whenever Berit and I are planning a trip our first question is always “Can we ride there”?  When we first starting going out I lived in Glasgow and Berit lived in Edinburgh.  We got into the routine of regularly cycling between the cities to see each other.  This was before I had a Garmin, but I remember my best time for the 50 mile or so trip was 2 hours 45 minutes door to door.  Not bad compared with the bus, train, walk combo that public transport offered. (Okay, so I needed a shower, a change of clothes, food and beer too so I guess you should factor that into the time too).

After we moved in together we’d still generally go places on our bikes whenever possible, but I guess “Can we ride there?” became a sort of policy after our first ride to visit Berit’s parents in Aberdeen.  Since then we’ve answered “Yes” to that question about a lot of places and events.  We’ve done the Aberdeen trip three more times, ridden to visit my parents in Kilsyth many times, battled through wind, rain, wrong turns and closed bridges to the Lake District and even ridden our tandem to the Tour of Fife.  Last winter we rode to every race in the Borders Cross Country Series. (Well, except the Galashiels one – we ran to that from Berit’s flat in Galashiels).

This blog will be about these rides.  I might mention the events and places we ride to – but the main focus will be on the getting there (and back).  I guess I’ll write a bit about planning the routes, and maybe a bit about kit. But mostly I’ll describe the rides themselves. I hope I can do justice to how awesome saying “yes” is, and inspire you to just ask the question: “Can we ride there?”