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Upcoming Events

Save The Date: 1st–3rd May 2015 for the UK’s very first Cycle Touring Festival!

If your calendar is anything like mine, you’ll already be fighting off an encroachment of frankly irritating weddings, bachelor weekends, milestone birthdays, must-visit festivals and other far-future shenanigans. How are we supposed to fit any adventures in? Can everybody stop getting married already?

If you’re in or near the UK, though, the 1st–3rd May 2015 is one weekend you’ll want to put a big fat circle around right away. (Here’s a handy link to auto-add it to iCal, GCal, etc.)

Because, thanks to the diligent efforts and sheer enthusiasm of these two world cyclists (welcome home, guys!), those dates will see the UK’s first ever Cycle Touring Festival taking place. Whoop!

Expect a fun weekend of inspiring talks, tour-planning workshops, food and revelry among like-minded people. Even I might stand up and say something coherent for a change. Heaven knows, we might even get some cycling in too.

Absolutely everyone is welcome, from total newcomers to grizzled veterans of life on the road. It’s all happening in the grounds of Waddow Hall, Lancashire, amid some of the best rural cycling routes England has to offer, and with camping space for ruddy tons of us.

I’m helping the guys get things up and running, part of which is helping spread the word about the happening. So this is a heads-up to let you know that a limited number of discounted earlybird tickets will be released at the end of this month.

More full-price tickets will be available closer to the time. It’s a not-for-profit event, so pricing is accessible as we can make it. We want maximum attendance and revelry, y’hear?

Click here to sign up at the Cycle Touring Festival website to be among the first to hear when the first batch of tickets go on sale. Don’t forget to put it in your calendar! (I’ll also drop a line to my own mailing list subscribers at the same time.)

P.S. If you’re still being non-committal about the date you’ll set out on your own big cycling adventure, why not start from the festival? There’s nothing like a looming deadline…

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Upcoming Events

Inspiring, Informing & Connecting Overland Adventure Travellers: HUBB UK

hubbuk-logo-home-advspec

I don’t normally dedicate entire blog posts to a single event, but this is one that deserves special attention. Because there aren’t many events in the UK calendar that deal specifically with the planning of long overland adventures.

HUBB UK, however, is one of them. Spawned from the hugely popular Horizons Unlimited overland travel bulletin-board, and covering cycle-touring, motorcycling, 4x4-ing and other forms of overland independent transport, this is much more than a handful of lectures: it’s a full-on festival lasting four days (with camping and beer and everything), consisting of over 200 sessions of talks, demonstrations, workshops, Q&As, challenges and competitions on every topic you’d imagine relevant to adventurous overland journeys.

The event’s stated purpose is ‘Inspiring, Informing and Connecting’, but I think it’s the first of these that’s the most important. Knowing that what you’re dreaming of doing is possible — and that others like you have already done it — is the most empowering piece of knowledge to have while you’re laying plans for your first big trip.

So while there’ll undoubtedly be plenty of informing and connecting on the cards, it’s really for the inspiration that I suggest you come along. I’ll be there all weekend, presenting on adventure filmmaking and getting involved wherever else I can, and I hope to meet a few readers in the process!

I’ll also be demonstrating the results of an ongoing project/experiment, involving fully-loaded touring bikes, recycling centres, Poundland, and very very tight travel budgets! More on that soon…

Find out more at the HUBB UK website.

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The Film Upcoming Events

Touring the UK with Janapar: dates & cities

Woodland Fell

Life in the Lake District continues as usual: rainy, rural and stunning. But things are about to get rather busy as I hit the road with Janapar this month. 

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The Book The Film Upcoming Events

Calling All Adventure-Loving Clubs & Societies From Gibraltar To The Urals

With six days left to go, the Kickstarter campaign is going from strength to strength. After the stressful two-year process of creating the book and the film, flying by the seat of our pants throughout, James and I are now in the slightly more comfortable position of being able stop and to look a little further ahead.

Fog on Usal Road

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Upcoming Events

The Best Cycle-Tour Planning Weekend In Existence Is 11 Days Off

Is it really that time again?

Really?

RGS Explore 2009