Chipps and friends talk about an essential rite of passage for any mountain biker: the road trip.
Words Chipps, Joe Murray & Matt Letch | Photos as credited
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I’ve been a fan of the mountain bike road trip since I started mountain biking. In the pre-internet days, trail knowledge was limited and the trails outside of your immediate area fell into the ‘Here be dragons’ category. If you were lucky, a distant friend, or someone’s brother, might live near the Peak District and have a spare floor, or have a tip on some good trails in Wales near a decent campsite. You’d load up the bikes and head off. A few days later, you’d make it back home, sunburned and waterlogged, scuffed, dehydrated and badly fed from a diet of motorway coffee and fast food.
For some early adventurers, (like me and Kona/VooDoo Bikes’ Joe Murray, as you’ll see in a second), bike racing was the social life they didn’t know they needed and every other weekend was spent wanging up the M1 or M6 on the way to a NEMBA campsite on a Friday night, instructions read by torchlight from the photocopied directions. A single ‘Race Camping’ sign would announce the venue. Cue some random parking, headlight-lit tent erection and a couple of beers in an unknown location.
Dawn would herald a glorious view of whatever Lakeland valley the race was being held in, making the six hours on motorway contraflows worth every minute. The car, or ‘borrowed’ work van – its original use forgotten for now, would be used as a makeshift shed, kitchenette, changing room and dive bar for the weekend, making the return journey infinitely harder. The contents would have shifted tectonically over the weekend, with assorted bags, Tesco bags of hunger-inspired yellow sticker specials, clean and dry – and wet and used – riding kits, all swapping places – and everywhere tyre marks: on the headlining, on the leatherette seats, on the doors. And that’s before the six-hour ‘Sorry, the M6 is closed for essential works’ return home, arriving at midnight for a frantic unpacking and group farewell on the drive, as you futilely attempt to return the car to its previous role as company car, or school-run vehicle before the morning.
Still a thing?
I wonder if the road trip, as I romanticise it, is still a thing? Mountain bikers, as a group, have aged, and some home comforts have crept into trips. A Premier Inn room is booked before anything else, followed by a WhatsApp group to determine whose car has the most space for bags and coolboxes. Bikes will stay outside on the rack, rather than sharing the (nicely air-conditioned) back seats with Jimbo and Dave. A Google-recommended off-motorway bistro for dinner before you arrive at the luxury of your ‘one whole bed per person’ accommodation.
Yeah, that might happen more these days, but I know that still, out there most Friday evenings, there’ll be too many mates and too many bikes crammed into a car that’s too small, hitting warp speed up the M6, only to return a few days later, dirtier, smellier and happier, with another epic mountain bike trip smashed.
The Road Trip – Joe Murray
Mountain biking and The Road Trip™ totally go together. I’ve been doing it pretty much since I started riding a mountain bike. A road trip or THE road trip means getting out there to the best places with the best trails. Arguably, the most sublime experience is to ride a new and awesome singletrack that has all kinds of surprises – mostly good, but some a bit scary. Humans like to discover things, even though many of us have to be content to ride the same trails most of the time. No doubt we all dream of being a free bird, yet because of the job, partner, kids, house, life is not always an endless singletrack road trip.
Knowing this early on, I knew I wanted to ride and road trip more than being responsible, so I got into racing. Sometimes there were too many events with dirt roads and the dreaded ‘going around in circles’ thing. In the early days, more mountain bike races were ‘cross-country’, meaning you actually went ‘across the country’. Yet racing was road tripping, not just pounding the racecourses. Sure, I got paid to do it, and I raced to win. Looking back, the road trip was probably a major reason I wanted to race. Now I’ve mostly got racing out of my system, the road trip has remained what I do. This, besides adulting (paying the bills) and planning for the next road trip. I made sure early on, even when I knew racing was short-lived, that I found a means of making money which allowed me to ride.
Riding the same trails day after day, no matter how good they are (we live in Sedona, AZ), is surely not familiarity breeding contempt, yet we have the means to bug out most any time. Starlink makes it even more possible these days (as much as I think Elon is a psycho). And there’s the burning of large quantities of fuel. My partner and I road trip in an eight-year-old Sprinter van. It’s 70 square feet of living space. I figure if a couple can get along in that for a week, or better, even a month, then you will get along most likely for a very long time. I like to say I built it out myself, because it was a shit ton of work. It was fun and rewarding, partly because I made sure to install a shower inside. Sleeping all scummy from a long, sweaty ride is OK for one night. That said, long ago, I was on a month-long bikepacking tour, and we had a contest to see who could go the longest without a shower. I lasted 12 days, yet those are things young people do.
When I was young, a 1966 VW van was my first camper. Another young gung-ho thing with that included replacing an engine on the side of the road in Mexico, with a skateboard and a jack. These things were considered more part of the adventure than a pain in the ass at the time. One gets older, softer and more into comfort over time and there’s not much peace of mind with a 60-horsepower air-cooled motor. Regardless, I believe the camper to be the ideal road trip tool for getting to some remote epic trails in western North America. There are, of course, excellent trails I can ride near urban areas, yet getting away from the trappings of humanity is more memorable. Getting to epic trails out in the boonies and then camping there means not having to go back into the rat race quite so soon. There’s something inexplicably profound about going out into the night and gazing up at the Milky Way while taking a leak.
Thinking Bigger
Sometimes, the road trip bug spreads further than just laps of UK motorways and someone drops the idea of a European trip, trying to take in as many of those honeypots you’ve only ever seen on the Instagrams. How hard can it be? And with that, we make no apologies for reprinting this ode to road-tripping from our old friend Matt Letch that appeared in an issue back in 2012. Possibly the most accurate and raw look at the art of road tripping we’ve ever read.
Man (and a few other men) in a van.
There are rules. If you’re a drummer in a band, then you need a van to transport your drums. Therefore, you will always be volunteered to drive the rest of the PA system to gigs. If you’re a mountain biker with a van, whether you bought it for bikes, or it’s been gently loaned to you for your work, your friends will inevitably will turn up one day in the spring with a European road atlas and ‘that’ look in their eyes… ‘Let’s go to Europe on a road trip!’ they’ll say. ‘It’s not that far away, and we can all help with the driving and the petrol money. It’ll be great!’
Three months later, you’ll be trying to find loose change for the tolls under the seat at 4am on an Austrian motorway, while your ‘brothers-in-arms’ snore loudly from somewhere under a pile of bikes and sleeping bags in the back.
But, there are rules…
I’ve done a few van trips – and like so much in life, the promise and reality are so divergent from each other that at some point (probably as you open a carton of milk that is now nearly yoghurt) you will hear yourself scream ‘Next year, a hotel!’
But the damage is done. Even as I write this piece and describe a slide back down the evolutionary tree to single-cell amoeba in a festering van full of ex-friends, my mind is already imagining the open road, fresh mountain air, unpasteurised treats, rough village wine from a leather bladder and killer singletrack as we cruise across Europe, hitting spot after spot.
Space will never end
There are (I believe) two main things to blame for these delusions. The first is the empty chasm that is the back of a van. It’s like the Stargate portal; an infinite adventure, the endless potentiality of it, with enough riding kit and bikes, camping gear and cool boxes, anything is possible. And with friends to share the trip (and the fuel and ferry crossing cost), memories will be shared.
The second is road maps. Do you know that the distance from a tiny valley in the north of England to a beach at Finale on the Italian Riviera is barely a whole hand breadth? From your little finger to the tip of your thumb, you can be transported from grey skies and GORE-TEX® all-in-ones to dusty trails, a fantastic gelato post-ride… Sigh.
Somehow then, you end up on the M6, the wrong side of Birmingham, in a jam, watching rain smash against the window by the bucketload while finding out, both verbally and olfactorily, that Jim has ‘got dodgy guts’ with the clock ticking away alarmingly towards your impending Eurotunnel slot.
Calais is one of the darkest places in the world, as is the French motorway system. As you drift off for a quick nap, you hear the new driver saying, ‘So which way is it round roundabouts?’ and you snap back awake and stare out of the front windscreen with eyes wide apart as you roar through the night, your life in the hands of someone who wants to ‘clarify’ the ‘roundabout situation’ in Europe.
A few days into your trip, and the smell starts: damp kneepads, fetid socks, cow shit on tyres (which you’ll come to think of as air freshener compared to the stink of humanity in the van). As the driver over-enthusiastically takes a corner, you swipe for the grab handle above you, only to find your hand ensconced in another man’s wet chamois… and so it continues.
“Wake up! Wake up!”
“…huh?”
“We’re at the border. They’ve got guns!”
Dragging myself from the sleeping bag on the floor of the van (crushed under the feet of the people in the seats above me), the back door opened to reveal me looking sheepish in a pair of pants, trying to pull my jeans up. The customs agents are fortunately repelled by the human stink bomb that erupts as they open the door and after a bit of screwing up of faces, we’re free to go.
Switzerland. Their service stations are strange places. DVDs that range from people in Victorian apparel singing on boats, to sado-masochistic nun porn, all sitting next to each other – right next to the kiddies’ sweets. If you get there late at night, they have the most confusing automated fuel pumps known to humanity. When combined with the hallucinogenic state that driving for ten hours can bring, I’ve had to wait for kindly Swiss folk to appear and explain to me how to change the setting back from petrol to diesel or how to get more than ten cents’ worth of fuel. Hot tip here: they do not like to be hugged in thanks by a stinking man with bloodshot eyes. They’re just not into it.
Don’t think it’s all bad though. Driving through Italy in a long wheelbase Sprinter is probably the most invigoratingly terrifying thing I’ve ever done; your horn is a genuinely useful driving tool, capable of more expressions than a human face… ‘Let me out!’ ‘Let me in!’ ‘Of course I’m turning left into that one-way system!’ Then there’s the ‘one euro a hit’ espressos at services ’til you end up grinding teeth and spend hour after hour sitting on the rev limiter, gesturing people out of the way.
We didn’t mean to hurt him
In between the driving to destinations, of course, vans also make great uplift vehicles – ideally, you need someone to injure themselves early on, badly enough that they can’t ride, but not so badly that they can’t drive. Alternative plans include ‘hobbling’ – look for the weak one in the group, someone who finds it hard to say no and preferably has a sedate home life that precludes regular drinking. After dinner, introduce them to the delights of limoncello or the ‘delicious’ local grappa. Ignore all hand gestures to stop topping up the glass, and the next day you have your driver! (If they’re not too sick, they can also make the sandwiches for lunch.)
A week later, as you arrive home with weird tan lines on your body, leaner generally, except for the beer pot, you open that bag of gifts for your loved ones. As you hand out the broken seashell sculpture of that monastery you didn’t visit and the leaking leather bladder full of vinegar, you wait until last to pull out the greatest thing that you found on the trip, an unpasteurised cheese from this tiny farm that’s matured in local leaves and has been made the same way for centuries… as you open the box and screw your face up at the smell, you realise you’ll never eat it – it smells too much like that van.
Keeping the faith
We all know how the story ends: the muddy kit still by the door as you make your way back to work, the massive depreciation of whoever’s car you took, the random toll charges, speeding tickets and phone roaming fees that sideswipe you a month later, the strained relationships. But you know that, someday soon, a friend will send you a video of a fantastic-looking trail that gets you fired up. ‘It’s only a six-hour drive…’ they’ll say, and you’ll know that you’re in again, even before they ask.
