Writer Rob Ainsley has cycled from Barmouth to Yarmouth because they rhyme. He’s cycled from Britain’s smallest church in Rhos to its largest church in Liverpool. He’s cycled the London Monopoly board. And he continues to amass a long list of ‘end-to-end’ country cycles. So for Rob, cycling from Morecambe to Bridlington along the Way of the Roses cycle route may at first glance appear to be a little, err… pedestrian. But think again. He decided to cycle the route 1970s style. In this episode of The Cycling Europe Podcast we chat to Rob Ainsley in York where he reveals all. Was the naffest decade of the 20th century as good a time as any to be on two wheels? Or better forgotten…
[Music] welcome to episode 80 of the cycling Europe podcast my name is Andrew Sykes and in a few moments we’re going to be heading to your to have a chat with Rob anley he’s appeared on the podcast before he’s the man who makes the music that you’re currently listening to and he’s going to be talking to us about cycling the way of the Roses 1970s style but before we go over to York a reminder if you’d like to get in contact with the podcast visit cyclingeurope.org for/ Conta and if you’d like to help support the podcast then visit cyclingeurope.org for/ support so without further Ado I asked Rob to begin by introducing [Music] himself hello uh my name is Rob anley I’m a cycle writer and I live in York and uh basically my job consists of riding to obsc cure places and then writing bad jokes about them and a couple of months ago I did a bike ride that took me back in time when I rode the way of the Roses from morham to bidlington 170 Mi across Northern England on a 1979 bike and with only 1970s kit and of course you are the person who produces the music for this podcast um which I very often forget to credit you for so before we go any further thank you for producing the music thank you for writing performing the music that uh continues to appear at the beginning and end of these uh of these podcasts are you are you still busy with the music haven’t done any writing for about a year and I’m hoping to get back to that but I’ve just been rather too busy cycling yeah cuz apart from the 1970s cycle that you’re going to be talking about you’ve obviously continuing to do your to end trips um and hopefully we’ll get a chance to to talk about the ones that you’ve done recently but just to kind of wet wet our appetite which ones have you done most recently so yes I collect International end to ends and I’ve done about two dozen countries so far the last couple I did were ltia Luxembourg and Denmark which I’ve just come back from and in a few days time I’ll be off to do Switzerland right okay so we’ll catch up about those in a bit uh we’re sitting in cycle heaven in York which is where you live well not in the bank shop but in the it’s like it sometimes in the in the in the city of York um hence the uh the background noise of um coffee being made Etc what gave you the original idea to set off and cycle 1970s style um the 1970s let’s face it doesn’t have a great reputation when you look back at all the Decades of the 20th century I think probably the 1970s with the exception perhaps of the 1940s might be down there at the bottom of the list it doesn’t have a great reputation it’s thought of as the nafest decade in in recent uh times it certainly was a time of power cuts of strikes of rampant inflation a lot of casual racism and sexism uh but then on the other hand there were things that we’d like to get back you could um a family with just a single wager on an average wage could afford a three-bedroom semi and uh job security was much better than it is now you didn’t have to work on social hours so yeah it was a different time but uh in some ways it can be unfairly maligned right okay so and also crucially for you it was the first it was the decade when you first set off on a on a cycle tour uh that’s right for me I was a teenager in the 70s so a lot of formative experiences such as the first job first sacking all that kind of thing and in January 1979 I got my first proper bike a rally Clubman and went on my first bike tour with a friend of mine we rode from Hull to York stayed on a barge in Selby met a magician it threw it down with rain and I just remember thinking this is just brilliant this is such such a great way to spend the time the sense of freedom sense of excitement and exploration and I’ve been cycle touring ever since so you’ve decided to go on this 1970 style cycle tour in preparing for the ride I mean clearly it’s easy to not take a mobile phone it’s easy not to use the internet uh while you’re cycling but presumably you had to buy some 1970s style kit and Equipment um how easy was that well the first thing was the bike and it started because I got an email from a magazine R right Force saying rob do you have a vintage bike and this is a bit like if you’re an actor and your agent says can you ride a horse of course you’re going to say yes because there’s a part in it so I knew that there was some work in this somewhere so of course I I I wouldn’t lie my mom told me never to lie she said if you lie Santa Claus won’t come and so I told the truth and I said funnily enough I’m thinking of buying a vintage bike which was true it hadn’t been true five minutes before but it true now so uh there was another article in it somewhere um but I needed a vintage bike so I did the usual thing looked at eBay Gumtree and so on uh found a bike from a bike recycling charity called Resurrection bikes of Harriet and they take donated bikes fix them up and sell them for various charitable causes it’s all good stuff and your money is going to help disadvantage people in countries like Ukraine and Peru and England and I test drove a few bikes and just fell in love with this Claude bottler it was clearly a 1970s bike a a fast tourer and took it home and when I got it back home I looked online and found it had actually been made in January 1979 which was the same month I started cycle 2 so that set me thinking could I ReDiscover some of that excitement of 1970s touring so that’s where the idea all came from can I just ask you about the bike I mean you you’ve talked there about how you actually managed to get hold of a a vintage bike um but increasingly there are lots of events uh both in Britain and abroad um quite high-profile events where cyclists are required to get hold of and cycle at this particular event a vintage bike so is actually there a is there a growing demand for them and have they become quite expensive to get a hold of it varies the bike I bought was £50 which seemed pretty good value because in its day it was a very good bike it would cost about £170 in 1979 at the time that was equivalent to about 350s of Guinness in a pub £50 now is what about 25 or 30 points of Guinness something like that so it was a bargain and it was in very good nick it didn’t need anything doing to it it rides beautifully it’s it’s a really nice bike to ride comfy you can ride it all day it’s it’s it’s live and it’s fast and it’s graceful but the people who who take part in these events like ve retro and others one in France called uh andu V something there’s one there’s the famous One in Italy the heroa Festival the people who take part in those they do have some beautiful old vintage bags and presumably they do cost a lot of money they certainly can and if you look online you can see the websites of various professional restorers who make fantastic jobs of meticulously recreating 1950s classic Italian races and sure they can cost 2 three four 5 6 7,000 and more how many how many pints of Guinness is that they’re probably enough to last me a year um and yeah at events like V retro which I just visited last weekend I was covering it for a magazine you see a whole range of bikes from old rallies that have just been in somebody’s garage for 30 years to some of these fantastically recreated masterpieces from the classic era of Italian racing which yes would cost as much as a as a decent car so you’ve got your 150 quid uh 1979 Lord Butler um was it ex did you keep it exactly as it was made in 1979 or did you did you have any uh did you were you required to change anything or modernize anything I didn’t have to do anything to it uh the rack was still original but I actually got a saddle bag from kise of Nelson the famous traditional luggage makers uh they very kindly gave me a large saddle bag which just looks great on the bike uh some Point somebody had changed the double cassette at the front to a triple uh sorry the double chain ring at the front to a triple chain ring which made it a bit easier up the hills uh I think it had modern tires but everything else was pretty much original and it was still in great working order so I put out an appeal uh to friends on Facebook and that sort of thing saying does everyone any anyone have any 70s kit they could lend me and it was really easy clearly a lot of people had this stuff just sitting around in their garage and they were delighted to lend it to me so uh for example I got um a rain Cape these traditional rain capes that are like a cfan uh that covers the handlebars and and all of you and it’s just got a hole that your head goes through and I used that on the way of the Roses trip uh and it was surprisingly effective actually for old equipment I got some vintage lights and I saw a picture of these at the cycle touring festival and they were by far my favorite bit of the kit because I had exactly the same ones and I would imagine most people who cycled in the 70s and early 80s had these lights yes and it’s this interesting contrast whereas bikes yeah bikes have changed a bit but basically your 1970s bike if it was a decent bike to start with still rides beautifully it handles a little bit differently but it’s still a delight to ride but those old lights they were terrible the front light which I’m sure many people remember it was the size of a house brick it took two batteries that were like the size of baked bean tins and the same weight and you got about half an hour of flickering candle light if you were lucky and very often when I’ve been out on my bike people have stopped me uh just to talk about the lights they I remember those lights I had some of those terrible they were and that’s an aspect of cycling that has got so much much better because as we know modern lights they’re inexpensive they’re efficient they they illuminate really well they last for ages on a recharge on a set of batteries so I certainly wouldn’t go back to the old lights yeah I mean to a certain extent You could argue that the modern bike lights are probably over engineered in terms of the the amount of brightness that they give you you can get a thousand loomin and that seems phenomenal I remember seeing the first modern or using the first modern bike light that I bought well 10 15 years ago and the the chap who sold me in the uh in the bike shop down in kasham he took me into a dark alley next to the uh bike shop and and switched this thing on and I was just amazed as to how bright it actually was so I think there’s an argument there that we might have gone a bit too far now in terms of what actually is required by your average cyclist in terms of a a bike light but certainly not I’m not advoc going back to a 1970s ever ready uh lamp well yes some of them are like the illumination at a rock Stadium concert um so yes they can be a bit over the top and it can be a bit blinding when people are coming towards you and uh what else did I get um I got some vintage maps and also I got a a 1970s camera because I was quite Keen to do what I did in the 1970s which was take pictures on an old 35 mil SLR using black and white film and I did take some black and white pictures and uh they’ve some of them are are appear in the Artic in cycle magazine that we’re about to talk about and and that was fun and it’s it was a bit of a surprise to find that black and white film is still a thing you can still buy it you can still get it developed it works out really expensive it works out about a pound per print and so that means you have to really think about your pictures you have to plan ahead you can’t just snap away like we’re used to now you can just take video and pictures and and you might take a hundred in a day and look through and choose the three or four that you like best it’s not like that with a traditional old camera um and but it was quite fun rediscovering those old techniques that I remember using in the 70s and and I was quite pleased with some of the results I would imagine most people nowadays would struggle to actually work a an old style film SLR bearing in mind that you know the concepts of stop numbers and apertures and film speeds they they do appear on your mobile phone but people don’t really appreciate what they are because uh they’re no longer really it’s all automatic and uh you never have to really set them whereas back in an old style SLR from the 70s you really have to think quite carefully about how bright it was uh what you were photographing the depth of field things like that um I mean I’m guessing that that wasn’t an issue for you uh I that’s right I was using a Pentax K a000 which was a classic student camera of the time lent to me by an artist friend and yes it was that old traditional stuff of you had a light meter reading you then had to decide which f- stop and which shutter speed uh you then had to uh focus and it might well take you 30 seconds or a minute to to get a shot ready so it wasn’t point and shoot certainly but then on the other hand it does force you to think carefully about the shots so yeah you you can still get some good results and the maps you took Bartholomew half inch Maps which I recognized and when I saw them at the cycle touring Festival I thought oh yeah my dad used to have loads of those in fact I think I still have cuz I I I I now have all these old Maps um I’ve never really looked at them in any kind of detail um for a long long time because I think nowadays most people if they’re going to buy a map they tend to buy the Ordinance survey map um were they any good they actually weren’t quite as bad as I’d feared the advantage of Bartholomew’s Maps I was told by Club cyclists of the time was that they were just the right scale for a day trip they were sort of okay uh but I still prefer OS Maps which is what I used in the’ 70s and I I still tend to be a paper map sort of Person of course I’ve got an app on my phone usually that shows me where I am it’s it’s very reassuring to have that little blue dot that uh tells you exactly where you are in that suburb of France or that remote Country Junction but for me OS maps are still the ones that give me a a feel for the landscape I’m going through and allow me to understand and appreciate everything that’s around me rather than just following an arrow telling me where to go yeah I think it’s that aspect of of knowing what’s to the left and what’s to the right you don’t necessarily have a plan to go there but it’s nice to know what’s there in the next Valley which you don’t obviously get if you’re just looking at quite a phone sized snapshot on Google Maps but anyway that’s a another discussion all together right so you’ve got your equipment um and how did you decide what route to take I wanted something achievable cuz I wasn’t really sure how many days the Claude Butler might stay in good nick uh so I thought something that was about 3 4 days would feel about right and I’ve done the way of the Roses a couple of times on other bikes and I’ve done pretty much all of the bits of it several times on other rides but that seemed the right sort of challenge it was easy to to do easy to get to from my home which is in York one of the nights I could actually stay at home so it was all logistically very straightforward and it’s just a great ride as as you know so can you can you just say where it starts and where it finishes so the way of the Roses is 170 m Coast to Coast across Northern England from morham on the west coast near Lancaster through York to Bridlington on the East Coast most of it in Yorkshire and it goes through Lancaster and York which of course are associated with the houses of Lancaster and York the walls of the Roses yeah I remember when I did it a few years ago I I was amazed by The Loon Valley that first bit when you come out of morom and you’ve been through Lancaster and then there’s this Long Valley heading in the direction of Yorkshire and I really wasn’t expecting that at all it was a really beautiful bucolic even Valley um that you follow as you make your way in the direction of of Yorkshire yes it’s quite a surprise because you’re dead flat you’re long rail Trails basically morom to Lancaster you come east out of Lancaster for about four or five miles and then suddenly you get to a Viewpoint called the crook of loon and there’s a little few picnic benches and you get this view up the Loon Valley and you suddenly get a feeling for what’s about to happen for the next few days and that was where I first had my first challenge coming out of there there was a road closure with no diversions signposted and uh not having access to the the quick uh fix of an app telling me where I was I was dependent on the maps and I was stood there trying to make head or tail of the Bartholomew maps and I was rescued by a local cyclist uh really nice guy just out for a ride he didn’t know about the road closure either but he knew the roads and so he showed me a little back street diversion down little farm lanes and uh over the river and got us back onto the route and we sat and had a chat and a little picnic in the village of Hornby which has a little village shop and we just sat outside and had a pork pie and a can of fizzy drink and that was when I thought yeah this trip is going to work because this is just the sort of traditional thing that we like to think of as an as a Timeless aspect ofy in the serendipitous little meeting and all very pleasant you have a little chat then you both go on your way and uh that was that that made me think yeah I’m going to enjoy this can I just pick up on something you said there you said that you didn’t have access to your app on your phone to find out where you were did you actually take a a modern smartphone with you and if you did how close did you get to ever using it I did have a phone with me which I kept off most of the time uh for various reasons I had to stay in phone contact with people back home uh so yeah in the evenings I was certainly Consulting it I also had a a modern digital camera because I was doing this for a magazine article so I needed some color photos as well so I did end up having a bit of Modern Gear and yeah it’s really hard not to use these things we get so used to using it so yeah it wasn’t completely pure it wasn’t 100% uh technological austerity so when you were standing at that road thinking where the hell am I going to go before this nice chat turned up how close were you to whipping out the phone and looking on Google Maps the fingers were twitching right okay now accommodation um you didn’t camp and that’s kind of a perhaps the next question but uh how did you s out the accommodation bearing in mind that well did you plan it all in advance had you rung ahead before you set off on a landline presumably rather than your mobile phone from home um or was it all ad hoc I wanted to do it ad hoc because certainly when I started touring in the 70s from what I remember we didn’t set anything up in advance you just turned up when it got to about 5:00 you’d start looking around for a b andb or look for tourist information office or just go to a youth hostel and just turn up so I wanted to stick as close as I could to that so I got on the end of the first day to settle and it was throwing it down with rain and it was about 4:00 and I thought I’m ready to stop now so I couldn’t see any bnbs uh the tourist office was closed as many are nowadays uh there’s just not the funding ones that are still open are often run by volunteers so it’s unreliable opening so I went into the local bike shop three Peak Cycles uh which I’ve been in before and they were they were great they said ah yeah you know there’s a guest house just down the road or they said you could try the youth hostel at malum which I did know about it’s about 5 miles further on the guest house did have a space but it was a bit beyond my budget so I thought I’d chance it and ride on to malamuth hostel uh because I knew that in term time they are more likely to have spaces than in holiday time when they have school groups in so I cycled on through the rain and surprise surprise they had a dorm bed for £15 thanks to flexible pricing Dynamic pricing uh because they just happen to have a space left if I’d gone the week before it would have been £35 they told me so that was a victory for turning up at the last minute but there was certainly a sense of relief and it was a really pleasant evening in the youth hostel uh there can be delightful places to stay swapping travel’s tales in the common room and the youth hostel kitchen and uh that that was a really nice evening um yeah I I I stayed at malam youth hostel a few years ago and I stayed in one of those pods outside U which is quite nice until the heater broke um but it was quite nice but you’re right about that commun there is a really nice communal area uh in malam youth hostel and I I seem to remember because of the nature of malam Dale you don’t actually have mobile phone reception down there so it encourages people to not sit there on their phone and actually make conversation in the uh in the communal area of the of the youth hostel and that’s certainly what people were doing and and that made for a a very again this fairly Timeless experience of people just swapping gentle Travelers tales and families in there so you get the teenagers and uh parents and and even grandparents so that was that was a lot of fun so the next day I carried on to Rippon and again rolled up into Rippon about half past 4 5:00 tourist office was closed again uh I fear it may have closed permanently actually because I know there was talk of closing it permanently asked in a local cafe and they said well why don’t you try the the weather spoons just over there right in the Market Square in the center uh which I had actually stayed out before and I went in and surprise surprise another Dynamic pricing Bounty they had a last minute room available for £55 which I thought really wasn’t bad in the circumstances I was happy to go for that and so I celebrated with eff fishing chips and a pint of Stella because I was very keen on making it authentic and from what I remember in the 70s certainly in East Yorkshire where I lived and in the pub that I worked in in the ’70s there wasn’t real ale it just wasn’t a thing it was all keg bitter and logger so uh for my celebration drink in Rippon I thought I’d better keep it authentic and have a pint of fizzy ler so the still I had to do it’s a Pity your trip didn’t come via where I live in West Yorkshire because uh I have a real problem actually buying eff fish and chips cuz I live in a a cashless world and most well I think all of the fishing chip shops near where I live they insist that you pay with cash um I I make no comment as to why they might do that some might some cynics might think there are ulterior motives for them doing that but if you wanted a really 1970s uh experience of buying fish and chips come to the cuer valley in West Yorkshire and because you’ll have to you’ll have to use cash no cards no mobile phones no Apple pay you you definitely have to pay in cash um and they you stayed at home when you passed through York that’s right was there another day another night or was that only the three nights that you had uh that would that was the third night and that was my last night uh normally people stayed pocklington which is the next town after York it’s about 10 15 miles 50 mil Beyond York uh what I could do for that was something very non 1970s I got to pocklington and took the bus back to York with my bike because the x46 bus Which is the York to Hull bus takes bikes and it goes through pocklington and with the current flat Fair scheme it was only two quids so that was a very convenient and easy way of getting me from pocklington back to my home in York and then the next morning back from York to pocklington to resume the ride but that wasn’t really authentic cuz I don’t think they had buses that took bikes in the 1970s right back to the question I promise to ask you could have made life even more authentic if you’d taken a tent with you and camped 1970s style would that have been possible do you think do you think you could have got a hold of a an old canvas tent it would have weighed a many many kilogram on the bike not a a lightweight hubba hubba which comes in at 1.6 kg I think you probably have to quadruple that um and double it when it got wet did you ever consider um doing the camping thing yes the first time I did we of the Roses in 2010 I did Camp uh and I camped at morom and settle and rippen and pocklington when I did it that time but you didn’t do that 1970s Style no I did that 2010’s style in 2010 um so I didn’t do it this time because the saddle bag that I had wasn’t really up to carrying a tent even maybe an MSR hubba hubba but not the tent I’ve got also it’s getting as we know it’s getting a bit more difficult to find campsites that accept solo cycle tourers who don’t want an electricity hookup and don’t need a car parking space and uh it it seems to be getting harder to find those places uh so yeah I did think about it but it was a combination of thinking it’s just a bit too much luggage for me to carry on on an a bike that I wasn’t quite sure about yet you could have stayed at the Campsite in Horton in ribblesdale um I don’t know if you’ve stayed there in the past it’s uh in the middle of the Village um and there are no electricity hookups there and I think the chap who runs the place I think he probably still thinks it is the 1970s um he he lives in this kind of U old style tunnel I think it’s something like an Anderson shelter on the side of the uh on the side of the campus side it’s a great place to stay and um he probably hasn’t put his prices up since the 1970s either so uh should you ever decide to do it again uh camping style then certainly de you’ve got to deviate slightly uh away from um is it from settle I can’t remember yeah uh yes so you’ll go it’ll be north of won’t it uh so you’d have to go from cuz you go from ostwick fire hwith bridge and then turn near hwith bridge and turn right to go south to settle but you’d go north from there up to Horton which is only about a mile further on so yeah it yeah I think that’s certainly the the closest I’ve come to 1970s camping um in in Yorkshire anyway um right it’s getting a little bit sunnier outside because earlier it was throwing it down so we’re going to go for a short cycle I think and then we’ll come back to the 1970s cycling and hear Rob’s opinions as to which wins out the 1970s or 2024 in a few moments we’ve come out of cycle heaven and we’ve cycled past the race course in York and we’ve now arrived at the uh famous a64 road that you can hear in the distance but we can also see above us the globe of a uh well I think it’s the sun um Rob can you explain all so we’re on the trans penine Trail uh just at the southern edge of York and we’re on ncn 65 National cycle Network Route 65 and this part of ncnc 65 is a model of the solar system so we’re standing at the start just underneath the sun which is about 5 m above our heads and there’s a large golden steel sphere about the size of a Jacuzzi maybe and that’s the model of the Sun and to scale we’ve got all the eight planets and Pluto going due south from us on this dead straight old rail trail which is paved all the way to Selby about 12 miles away and the amazing thing about this is it gives you a feeling for The Emptiness of space so if we go about 50 m up there we’ll find Mercury which is the size of a p and then we’ll go another 50 m or so and find Venus which is about the size of a cherry tomato and so on and you can see just how much space there is even in the solar system you don’t strike me as a Jacuzzi kind of person but I’ll take your word for it um and and it is an accurate scale both in terms of the distances and in terms of the size of the planets and the Sun is that are they all accurate that’s right so I think it’s something like 600 million to one the scale basically means that if you’re cycling at 1 M an hour you’re cycling the speed of light so again that gives you a feeling of just how fast you would have to go even to get to Pluto never mind to get to the next star the nearest star is Proxima centor which I think on this scale would be in Johannesburg or something like that uh and that’s you know cycling at many times the speed of light cycling at Star Trek warp speeds so should we do a trail of the solar system yeah yeah and um although the if I remember rightly from my air level physics the uh the universe is expanding but I’m assuming that going back to our 1970s theme the distances haven’t changed very significant very significantly in the intervening 45 50 years well you’d need an astronomer for that uh a good place to go might be the astronomy Department of York University which actually has its own separate Solar System model that runs through the campus and that’s fun to visit as well but it was York University’s astronomers who set up this Trail in the first place it was a Millennium Project and uh they were very careful to get all the distances right and there’s various monuments along the way that make it a very interesting and fun route to cycle the sun itself they were delighted to find was exactly the same dimensions this scale model of it as a jauza well actually as um as standard Factory um uh containers for pressurized liquids so they just took the two hemispherical ends of this standard off-the-shelf Factory container put the two hemispheres together to make the Sun and they got themselves a bargain price scale model of the Sun and you were saying when we were cycling down here that actually it it follows the old Mainline route the East Coast Mainline route that they had to deviate uh not because of beaching but because of uh the coal mines in the 80s that’s right so this wasn’t a beaching casualty it’s the old East Coast Main Line the London to Edinburgh main line so alad came along here the famous steam engine that broke the world record in the uh 70 odd years ago or more and this was the East Coast main line but at in the 80s there was potential mining subsidence from new mines being developed in the Selby region around here so they diverted the train line and this was turned into a rail trail by sustrans and lots of fantastic volunteers who in the ’90s came and cleared it all out and and leveled it to give us this lovely cycle track that we have today so Cole isn’t that bad after all well uh the the minds have long since closed okay well we’ll go south I think um in the direction of Selby um and uh hopefully to a a quiet a spot where we can finish up our conversation about 1970s and decide whether you were better off in the 1970s or in 2024 when it comes to cycling long distances we’ve escaped the a64 although I can just about hear it in the distance and we’ve got as far as Jupiter which is how many million miles from the Sun oh I have no idea but it’s about a mile on this scale right okay um and we’ve got in fact I’m I’m sitting next to Judy Dench and there’s a chap with a pickaxe behind us who’s called Dave Jackson we’ve forgotten we’ve got to look on the map Dave Jackson Dave Jackson salute you Dave yeah he’s a he was a volun a sist volunteer yeah so he was one of the people that uh built this line in the 80s this rail trail with picks and shovels and a lot of hard graft along with many other volunteers okay and um we’ still get we’ still got to get to Uranus um and we’ll perhaps uh we’ll perhaps come back to your story later um but we’re going to pick up on the 19 1970s thing now we’ve we’ve been talking obviously about you um trying to recreate the the style of a 1970s cycle tourist and you’ve got the equipment you set off along the uh trans not the trans pedant tril that’s where we are now along the Yorkshire way of the Roses the way of the Roses that’s right yeah thank you it’s glad that I’m glad that somebody knows what they’re talking about the way of the Roses from moram over to uh Bridlington I think it finishes um now um overall in fact let’s go through the the different things the different aspects of traveling in the 1970s and the 19 what are we now the 2020s yes we are the 2020s um let’s start off with the bike how would you rate 1970s bikes compared to now basically really good if you have a a decent 1970s bike that’s still in good Nick it will be a lovely ride those old steel Reynolds 531 frames are still just pliable and flexible and forgiving Those Old Brook Saddles like on my bike you can sit on them all day and they’re still as as comfy as the first mile so in terms of riding the bike it wasn’t just good considering it was 50 years old it was just a lovely bike to ride some of the things were worse we mentioned lights the technology certainly got much better uh since then some of the technology like GPS of course yeah that’s just so handy now as well as all the things like if you’re abroad you can use Google Translate and all that kind of thing so there are many many things that have got better I think some of the things that have got worse the level of traffic has doubled since the 70s and yeah that that’s really noticeable I remember some of the roads that I cycled on in the 70s and early 80s that you wouldn’t dream of doing now because they’re just like motorways sometimes it feels the size of cars has doubled as well and that that can be a problem I think you notice that as well particularly on little country lanes other things that have got a bit more challenging finding a campsite like we were talking about earlier but then on the other hand there are so many things that the internet has enabled there are so many new ways of finding places to stay warm showers which Anna you’ve talked about many times on the podcast um Airbnb uh this wonderful thing in the Netherlands called fre to not defeat all these peer-to-peer Hospitality networks that the internet has enabled and they can make cycling cycle touring a joy so yeah there’s a lot of extra options as well things like youth hosts there’s a lot fewer youth hosts in the used to be but the ones that are still around I think are more welcoming places than than they were in the 70s you don’t have to do tasks anymore uh they don’t lock you out of of the place in the afternoons cafes I think the cafe menus have got more imaginative the food’s better now I mean of course caf’s wonderful places to sit out the rain in the 70s but I think they have got a bit better pubs have certainly got better uh they shut in the afternoon in the 70s they were often full of smoke they often weren’t very familyfriendly places then and generally speaking the the standard of of food the standard of the welcome the standard of the drinks has got better so in many ways I think cycle touring is is just a a more attractive proposition now even given the the slight disadvantages of traffic the people and of course the people stay the same almost everywhere you go almost everybody wants to help you and just uh uh and and be kind and and pleasant and and I think you know often there’s a talk of a golden age of cycling and people talk about the 1890 or the 1920s or the postwar years in Britain as as Golden Ages of cycling but for me the Golden Ages now and that was something I think that my 1970s trip certainly impressed on me that really all the stuff about the bike and the technology that’s all secondary the main thing is just getting out on your bike and going and I think there’s never been a better time to go cycle touring because this is the only time we’ve got yeah if you had to choose another decade bearing in mind the bike was invented in 18 1880s is is sort of the the the the modern Diamond frame bike so if you had TOS maybe yeah if you had to choose a decade between say the 1880s 1890s and now apart from you know big caveat let’s discount anything in the 21st century um what do you think would be the most interesting not perhaps the most um the best but what do you think would be the most interesting decade to replicate in terms of cycle touring apart from the 1970s that you’ve already done and what aspects of cycle touring would you have to kind of think carefully about to recreate if you put me in a time machine and said you can do the way of the Roses again but in in any decade then I would probably say that kind of prelapsarian 1900s the Ed era just because there’s so much interesting stuff happening there socially uh I think that to a modern Rider would have the most striking differences and the most Illuminating experiences and the emptiest roads yeah I would I would have thought yeah I was thinking you know the sheer lack of traffic um I did see something on social media yesterday I think it was somebody posted three pictures of mobile phones 20 30 years ago and mobile phones today and the fact that they got tiny uh there was something else that got really oh a laptop computer that had gone from this kind of uh almost like a breeze block into something that is basically paper thin but then the third comparison was a car it was a BMW from 30 40 years ago to a BMW now which for some bizarre reason has got phenomenally bigger um and obviously the impact that that has had as well as the number of them on the road is it it doesn’t quite blight cycle touring but it is a concern which is probably unique to the last 20 30 40 years yeah and particularly among down those narrow little country lanes some drivers do tend to Barrel along and many cars now occupy the entire width of the Road and I don’t remember it being quite so challenging in the’ 70s down those country lanes either for the uh size of the vehicle or the amount of traffic do you think it’s fair to say that I think you know if you go to the Netherlands for example a lot of people they I think it’s a an assumption that car drivers tend to be very accommodating to cyclist because most of them are cyclists back in the 70s were there more more cyclists about to to to to be concerned about do you think do do you think more people are back in the 70s related to the life and the experiences of a cyclist not necessarily A touring cyclist but somebody who simply used a bike on the roads and do you think that’s a dwindling number of people nowadays I don’t remember there being many people on bikes certainly not touring bikes there were more people in Hull where I grew up cycling to work certainly that sort of short mile or two between house and Factory but you were a slightly odd site on the road so I don’t think it’s that people were used to cycling I I suspect I it’s a PhD here for somebody but I suspect it’s a long-term change in driver psychology fueled by having the last 50 years of adverts on TV that that always sell you this illusion of control and the bigger your car the the the more powerful you are and and you buy these cars because cars always are going fast on on Alpine roads in Italy with without another car in sight and the reality is cars are usually being driven on a wet Friday afternoon in wolver Hampton uh in a traffic jam and apologies for the people who live in wolver Hampton nothing against wolver Hampton um but the reality uh is often very different from the image that we’re sold and I suspect it’s it’s something to do with that mainly this is an anglophone experience people in Australia say the same people in the US say the same uh I was just in Denmark doing an endtoend and the driver Behavior there was impeccable basically they would always be stopping to uh let you across there there’s good infrastructure which has cycle priority on cycle paths at Junctions but also the courtesy and consideration that you’d get from all motorists everywhere was very good and and that felt a very different experience to that of Britain which is a nice segue just to talk in briefly about your recent end to NS you’ve mentioned the Denmark one there uh there’s another couple that you’ve done recently and there’s one coming up next week um of the three that you’ve done recently I think remind us which country uh there’s laia which I did in summer last year it’s very nice very quiet very flat very green uh quite a lot of remote Country Roads and tiny little Villages uh I then did the Netherlands earlier this year which as you can imagine in terms of infrastructure was fantastic uh virtually the entire route from mastri down in the South to croning and up in the north and up to the coast virtually all of it was on segregated smooth wide delightful uh infrastructure for bikes uh so that was fabulous then I did Luxembourg worth investigating certainly if you’ve never been to Luxembourg some really good cycle routes uh traffic free wide tarmac plenty of lovely scenery especially in the Arden uh and it’s not very far you you could do it in a day but I spent three days doing it uh then Denmark which we did from uh flansburg on the German border up to scaran at the far north so all up Jutland at the Jutland peninsula delightful uh very rural excellent cycle infrastructure friendly people nice cafes that was a a very enjoyable experience and the next one which I’ll be starting next week is Switzerland which will be very different from Denmark uh quite a few Alpine passes some hideously expensive accommodation but then you’re coming with scenery that’s probably worth the money so uh I’ll be looking forward to that and we’re doing that from west to east some people might think actually doing an end to endend is a bit of a gimmick um and I say that in the nicest possible way um but actually having I’ve never done an end to end in this in the way that you’ve done them I’ve never never found the the northernmost point or the easternmost point and and headed for the opposite point on the compass but I have crossed entire countries the Netherlands back in 2022 Italy back in 2010 in effect France at least once perhaps twice three times uh and Spain Germany likewise longdistance routes and I think the nice thing about when you cross a country is that you see the whole thing on a bike it’s not like driving across a country because you don’t have the time to reflect upon what you’re seeing or just basically to stare at what you can see when you’re in a car obviously when you fly to a city or a Honeypot tourist destination you see that particular place but you don’t see everything else you don’t see the suburbs you don’t see the housing Estates you don’t see the the less attractive bits as well as the very attractive bits and I think it’s a really I can’t think of a better way to actually get to know a country and that’s the positive side on the depressing side I always find it a bit sad when I come back to Britain which is obviously the country I know best because that’s where I’m from and where I live um there are certain countries I would say most countries in Europe where I cycle across them Germany’s a fantastic example the Netherlands likewise but also France and to a certain extent Spain where you don’t see such levels of deprivation that you see here in Britain and I think um is that something that you’ve experienced do you come away from these end to ends thinking God you know what is it that these countries have done to have a society or to build a society which from the perspective of the saddle going from one end to the other seems a lot more a lot less divided in terms of affluence and the quality of people’s lives I think unfortunately I have to agree with you uh I’ve I’ve seen some very rundown and struggling areas of all sorts of countries but the feeling is it’s more so in Britain and certainly if you if if one did a ride from the home counties from uh godling or waybridge or chy or somewhere like that up to uh one of the more challenged Northern coastal towns you would see a huge variation uh in in standard of living in life opportunities and so on and and to get back to sort of the original Point yeah absolutely the the buzz of doing an end to end for me is seeing the totality of a country yes on the one hand it’s an arbitrary sort of thing you just have a point on one side and a point on the other and you work out a route between them that goes to some nice places and perhaps some dull places but I very much enjoy seeing all those aspects of a country stopping at the humdrum little Garrison towns or industrial uh cities and going into a very ordinary bar or Cafe and just getting chatting to somebody and they say well why have you come here this is this is just an ordinary polish Town well exactly that’s the point I I like seeing what life is like for most people as well as what life is like in the tourist attractions and the Honey pots and the picture postcard Villages and so on yeah I’m I’m completely with you there I I I do think it is a if you want to get to know a country get on your bike head to the top of that country or the bottom of the country or the east or the west and cycle across it and you’ll really begin to appreciate what it is I think the when I when I did that with Italy back in 2010 I came back home with a completely different impression of the impression I’d had of Italy up until that point simply because I’d only ever visited had flown in and visited Venice Rome Milan but then to actually cross the entire country for me it was a TR it was it was a different place yeah absolutely and one thing I’m very aware of going through this range of of European and other countries is how much immigration is a global issue and uh we we shouldn’t run away with the idea that immigration is a an issue that only affects Britain you go around Germany or Denmark or Italy or Spain and you see a lot of people on the move for all sorts of reasons so that’s uh that’s the way the world is now yeah interesting so um if people want to find out more about your 1970s experience if you’re a member of cycling UK you’ve probably already seen the article in cycle magazine um if you’re not a member of cycl in UK then join up cost you3 p a month that’s what I pay and I get a fantastic magazine once every two months um uh so you can certainly read uh Rob’s article in cycle magazine um but your own website obviously has information about the end to ends as well uh yes and all the various rides I do around Yorkshire and various other crazy rides like going from Britain’s highest Pub to Britain’s lowest Pub and Britain’s smallest Church to Britain’s biggest church and and all that kind of thing uh uh so the website is e2. bike that’s e figure 2 e. bike and of course you can actually hear lots of your music including the uh including the music that’s about to appear in a couple of minutes at the end of this podcast but you you’ve got quite a few bits of Music on on the website as well uh yes it’s all there somewhere it’s uh under the writings section and you can find links to all the pieces of music which were all inspired by places that I’ve cycled to so uh you can read all about the trip that produced the music as well but we’ve got to finish with Uranus we’re at Saturn um tell me about Uranus so uh Uranus was discovered by William hersel the uh German born astronomer in bath in uh 1700s 1781 I think and uh he originally wanted to call it George after the king but he decided to call it a different name and I can just imagine all his Pals in the pub in bath saying uh so George so so bill um what are you going to call that planet what you discovered and so I have decided to call it George George is that is light George now don’t don’t get me wrong bill you discovered it you name it but George it’s not not very classical is it you got Mars you got Venus you got Mercury you got Jupiter Saturn and then George don’t don’t quite work does it could he can he come up with something a bit more classical very well I shall call it Uranus you going to call it Uranus George yes what’s so funny how big as Uranus I don’t know it’s too early to say so why you all laughing so can we see Urus well if you come to my back garden and look through the telescope of course what what is so funny I don’t understand why you laughing n