Sid and Doris Bonkers are a couple of late-developing adventurers. Not for us the sawn-off-handle-toothbrush on the gap year trip to Borneo. For us an Explore/Exodus holiday to the south of Morocco has been about as edgy as it gets. Now we have more time we will do more adventuring, making our own plans, making our own mistakes and finding our own surprises. We particularly enjoy industrial archaeology and technical museums but we will find joy anywhere, such as the Hungarian button museum or an Edward VIII post box.
Sid is a wise and athletic polymath who can do an enormous number of things really quite badly. But he enjoys doing them more than most other people do. For instance Sid is a determined but sometimes ineffectual mechanic. Sid is the one who goes up on the coach roof in a gale to tie down the third reef. Sid chats up the people we meet to add their stories to ours.
Doris is proud to be an introvert, very happy in the company of one of a few excellent friends, you may sometimes find her in the kitchen at parties. If we went to parties. Doris is very clear thinking, a good planner and a fine navigator.
This blog is about our journeys, which may be on foot, ski, bike, horse, car, boat or any other damn fool idea that comes to mind. Our thoughts on the definition of Epic are in the blog here.
We live in Bishop’s Stortford, on the Hertfordshire/ Essex border. This is great cycling country, so it’s a shame we aren’t fitter. We’ve done Epic Journeys on bikes – in 2007 we cycled from Caen to Cannes and in 2009 from St Malo to Bilbao. In 2012 we created a cycling Tour de England where we completely underestimated how hard the Pennines were to ride. We’ve also taken our small Etap yacht, Eric, to Cherbourg, St Malo and the Channel Islands and back again (that was pretty Epic, getting back was good).
We have recently started doing classic car endurance rallies. They are thoroughly organised and usually well-supported. Sid and Doris will continue to enjoy other people’s organisation and the opportunity to meet similarly-mad people, but that big safety net means they are not truly Epic.
For each Epic Journey which we organise ourselves, we try to write an intro, report on the trip as we go along and eventually get around to a brief outro. Doris will make a map of the route, and the Epic Journeys link at the top of this page will take you to all of these. You can read Sid and Doris as we go or binge read later. If you know there is something interesting along the intended route do tell us, preferably before we get there.
The “About Us” tag leads you to some more pages to get to know us better, if you want to risk it.