3 More Big Bike Trips (& 1 Microadventure) You Can Read For Free On This Blog


Happy New Year! Some more holiday reading material for you today, particularly if you’ve enjoyed reading the free serialisation of my first book Janapar.

Blogging from the road is something I’ve done since the beginning of my travels. The stories that follow have been written and published from the road itself over several years of bicycle adventuring – from roads in Arctic Scandinavia, Canada & the USA, Europe, and most recently my home country, England, which is perhaps the most unusual tale of the lot.

To make reading them in sequence easier, you’ll find navigation buttons after the end of each instalment (just after the sharing buttons – hint!), which will take you directly to the next part.

Enjoy!

Arctic Scandinavia By Bicycle In Midwinter (2011)

Snow coated bike

I decided to post a series of short daily dispatches from my tent on a one-month journey I made in 2011 from Oslo, Norway, up past the Arctic Circle to Bodo, by way of Swedish Lapland. The twist? It was the middle of winter. I wanted to see if it was possible to travel by bike in extreme cold, and if so, what the experience would be like.

Find out by reading the dispatches, starting with Day 1.

Cycling The U.S. West Coast from Vancouver to San Francisco (2012)

Target practice (2)

The USA wasn’t a place I expected to push the boundaries of adventure. But that wasn’t really the point of this two-month ride. My younger brother Ben had emigrated to Vancouver years before, and this shared journey to San Francisco would be a way of getting to know each other again as adults.

Plus – the USA did surprise me after all, in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Start reading here.

A Recumbent Microadventure Home From The Netherlands (2013)

The view from my camp in Holland

This journey came about thanks to a wonderfully random and generous offer from a blog reader in the Netherlands. He wanted to give me his spare recumbent bicycle, on one condition: that I collect it from him in person so he could give me a crash-course in riding it.

Obviously it made sense to practice riding recumbent by cycling home to England. Here’s the first in the four-part series telling the story of that very laid-back and strangely retrospective bike trip.

#freeLEJOG – A No-Budget Bike Tour The Length Of Britain (2014)

St Michael's Mount

Bored with hearing people tell me they could never afford to do a big bike trip, I decided to prove the opposite by cycling the length of Britain on the lowest budget imaginable: zero. Not a penny. No credit card as backup. Nothing. And on a bike I rescued from the scrapyard.

It was the scariest and most memorable three weeks of riding I’ve ever done, and by far the steepest learning curve I’ve ever climbed. Read all about it, starting here.

Fancy reading about my non-bike adventures? Check out my other adventure blog, TomAllen.info, where I’ll soon be recounting the various trips that led to my big new project for 2016.

Comments (skip to respond)

One response to “3 More Big Bike Trips (& 1 Microadventure) You Can Read For Free On This Blog”

  1. Hi Tom! I just found your site — very cool! Would you be interested in being interviewed on my Active Travel Adventures podcast? I cover multi-day (but not killer 4+ day active adventures that someone like me can do ( a fit 57 year old). If so, please email me and let’s talk! Thanks, Kit

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