Sid and Doris Bonkers and their Epic Journeys
"Everybody is normal until you get to know them"
In which Sid and Doris drop a lot of height, enjoy a long honest climb to a Hotel de la Poste in earth quake land. The Appenines crossing goes on.Getting across the Appenines will take a few days of determined cycling. This is not the holiday riding we are promising ourselves. Soon, though. Breakfast was comically unsuited to cyclists. The…
Read moreLook there is Autofity BAT! In CAPITALS because this is a famouf place, it was advertised on posters for milef or indeed kilometref around.And there are many hysterically funny names for tyre shops across Europe [many of which Doris has criminally failed to record on camera, apologies for that].In Hungary they were Gumi Service. Then in later countries, Vulancizers, Elasticons…
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A place to park the occasional gem… “It’s a good job these shoes aren’t white any more or they wouldn’t match my trousers.” (In Amsterdam) “I wonder whether you get a lot of Dutch people going to Venice.” “I knew it (the route) was going to be bad when I rode past a construction site with all the bike path…
Read more“S” writes: Hey! It’s Tour de France time! I’m soooo excited!! I get to sit on the sofa with the remote control for the television, it is a Very Responsible Job and I take it very seriously. [It’s ok, we’re watching it on ITV4 catch-up on the PC – D.] I am “G”s biggest fan, well not biggest of course…
Read moreIn which Sid and Doris use old railways to make progress up the Adriatic coast, passing fishing platforms and old battle sites before climbing to a faded grand hotel.It is Saturday morning and very quickly we are passed by a Wiry Old Gent on a thin bike. This is good news, all day the traffic is sharing with cyclists. We…
Read moreThe SS16 runs along the whole of the top/east/back-of-calf coast of Italy, and we’ve actually cycled up about half of it, now I look at the map. We started at Bari and left just before Pescara. And here are some things that flitted through my Doris-ian mind as I pedalled along it. We started in the “deep south” of Italy. …
Read moreAs we progressed south through Serbia and Bulgaria, we started to see a fashion for pre-booking grave spaces. The his ‘n’ her graves have been a bit thought-provoking, but in Apricena we find a huge newly-built mausoleum where you can reserve as many slots, for as many generations, as you want. Having seen a couple with their fronts off, I…
Read moreIn which Sid and Doris whoosh away from the hotel, elect for country roads, visit a necropolis and see the quarry where the marble comes from. Today’s mission was 102km and only 427m of climb. For the first ten minutes we climbed to the top of the village, then turned left and dropped all the height we had gained to…
Read moreIn which Sid and Doris plan to make a new plan later, passing the day with animatronic dinosaurs and quite a lot of eatingToday is a day of planning. After admiring the monumental (and pointless, because we are just going straight back down tomorrow) view, our first attempt was to work up a route over the Appenines to the Mediterranean…
Read moreOK, we seem to have whizzed across Turkey and Greece rather faster than we had originally planned. We’d looked at finding a nice Neilson beach resort to chill out in for a week, but the dates were hard to coordinate and in the end, at Patras, we simply bought a Bari ticket and carried on. So here we are in…
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