SO Many Flat Tyres! Cycling through Pembrokeshire | Bike Touring Britain & Ireland: Southern Wales

The bicycle adventure continues – en route to a movie date at the most remote cinema in Britain! We cycled out of Bristol and crossed the Severn Bridge to Wales. We were already way behind schedule; while cycle touring in England, we’d had a tonne of days off as we got used to the physical exertion of long-distance bicycle travel. Now, we cycled to Cardiff and then along the South Coast of Wales.

As we were cycling through Wales, we felt like the bike tour was truly beginning. We’d been stopping off with friends and family en route so far, meeting lots of familiar faces as we cycled through the British countryside. But now, we were pedalling off into the unknown.

We were about 2 weeks into our cycle tour of Britain and Ireland, when a heatwave spread across the UK. So our arrival in the rolling hills of Pembrokeshire coincided with sweltering heat. Boiling hot weather was the last thing we’d expected when planning to cycle tour the British Isles, and it took us by surprise. The hills were brutal, but the heat was worse, and we found ourselves setting off to cycle as late as 5pm some days to avoid the worst of the heat. But what frustrated us beyond belief, was puncture after puncture on Jill’s bike. In all, Jill would eventually have 7 flat tyres in 6 days!

CONTEXT:
In 2021, Jill and I were on a long-distance bicycle tour from Sussex to Shetland, for a movie date at the most remote cinema in Britain! Cycling so far would take us over five months, through pretty much all the terrain the British Isles has to offer.

Cycle touring as a couple was a first for us, and would take us through England, Wales, The Isle of Man, Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, finishing on one of the most remote islands in the UK: Out Skerries, in Shetland.

Jill and I met in 2020 (just before the pandemic kicked off) and started dating in the Autumn. In late 2020, Jill moved to Greece for six months to work for a couple of NGOs, before returning home the following Spring. So we realised that, due to Covid and long-distance, we had never actually been on a proper date… this needed to change.

But we’d been locked down for months, so we couldn’t just go somewhere down the road. We needed something a little more exciting. After some googling, we found just what we needed; the most remote cinema in Britain, on Out Skerries in the Shetland islands, the northernmost reaches of the UK. The perfect spot for our very first movie date.

Catch a train, a ferry, or a plane there? No, we’d been indoors for far too long. Why not hop on our bikes for over 5 months of fresh air, and 4,700km of pedalling through every country on the British Isles instead?

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