“What are you going to do?” asked many of our friends.
It was a tricky question to answer as we retired from our jobs in September 2016, Clare from teaching and Andy from a large global retailer.
What were we going to do? Our kids had grown up and left home, so after 35 years of work we suddenly had the freedom and opportunity to do almost anything we liked.
One day we came up with the idea to do something crazy like ride a bike from Bath in England (where we live) across Europe to Istanbul.
Crazy because we weren’t cyclists.
At that time we’d only been on short rides, always without panniers and always with a long coffee stop. Bath to Istanbul is more than 3000 kilometres!
But the idea kept nagging away at the back of our minds. And it worked with our friends too. They became so interested in the challenge and fun of such an adventure that they forgot all about the tricky question.
That meant we actually had to get our bikes out and go for it!
Well, not quite. It was September and cycling to Istanbul in the late Autumn would be much too cold, so instead we bicycled from Bath to Barcelona which was warmer (and shorter). The Pyrenees were in the way but we planned to go round them by taking the Mediterranean coastal route … not quite the way it turned out!
We managed to avoid most of the potholes along the way and after 2200 kilometres and seven weeks in close confinement we were surprisingly still together.
And we’d caught the notoriously infectious bicycle-touring-bug.
Since then we’ve enjoyed bicycle tours on five different continents including adventures through the Andes, around Tasmania, across Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and the east coast of America.
In 2024, we eventually cycled to Istanbul, now on e-bikes after Andy suffered from episodes of atrial fibrillation (AF).
It was going to be our last long trip but we’re so hooked on the e-bikes that we’ve decided to keep going. In 2025 it’s Bath to Rome … who knows where we’ll pedal to in the future!
Clare and Andy
Avoiding Potholes 