Yes, we were there the other week and the last bit of blue was closed. The cafe was also closed for winter.

I really dislike flashing for this reason and never doing. I also go further sometimes and if I know there is a cyclist filtering up behind me I deliberately block a side road rather than leaving a gap, even if the traffic is stationary and I otherwise would leave room. This is mainly on a road I cycle home from work along, so I know where the trouble spots are.

Aside from the actual risk to me as a cyclist, I also have a niggling feeling about the mentality behind it. As a cyclist I get all forms of abuse and close passes if I hold someone up for a second or two while they wait to overtake me. Even if there’s a queue ahead. But if there’s someone in a car waiting to come out of or into a side road it’s perfectly OK to slow down and flash them through, even though it causes just as much “delay”. But it’s OK, because that’s someone in a metal cage rather than a vulnerable road user…

Mortgage, bikes and trips away mainly.

No kids, and I don’t spend a huge amount on clothes (basically just replacing stuff when it gets too scruffy). Fairly low motoring costs (car was bought with cash and we commute to work by bike so it only gets used at weekends – and therefore most of our petrol spend falls into the trips away category). But we do seem to go away most weekends – I think we’ve only been at home 4 weekends so far this year (and are away this weekend too). Not all of this is particularly expensive stuff – some of it is staying with relatives so just the petrol cost to get there – but it does tend to mean at least one meal out, a fair amount spent on hotels etc.

Food shopping seems to take up disproportionate amounts – maybe partly because I tend to shop at the small shop within walking distance rather than buying in bulk from the supermarket (mainly because I’d have to drive there).

I don’t keep track of it particularly well, but don’t have particularly expensive tastes so tend to have money left over at the end of the month. Some of that goes into savings and some of it goes to the nearest bike shop (my bike buying habit seems to have slowed down, but is being replaced by a bike maintenance/improvement habit – I currently have a list of 5 bikes that I want to make some upgrades/repairs to…)

My OH and I had both entered a duathlon. About 3 hours drive away.

Midway up the motorway I noticed that the key for the lock I’d used to attach the bikes to the rack had fallen off my keyring. Took a diversion to find various cutting implements and stood in a garden centre carpark hacking away until we freed the bikes.

Restarted the journey. Got to the accommodation we’d book to find that they had no record of the booking (their mistake rather than ours as I genuinely had booked and for the right weekend too) and as it was a quiet weekend in early December they’d decided to shut and weren’t there. So, having phoned them to find this out we had to sit in the car waiting for them to drive over, turn the heating on and let us in.

We then unloaded the car and my OH realised that he didn’t have any running shoes with him. Having waited to be let into the accommodation it was now well past 6pm and all the local shops were shut and not re-opening until after the race started on Sunday morning.

In the berlingo club. It sits on the drive all week as we both cycle to work, but when it gets used it swallows stuff in the way a berlingo does, we sleep in it and all sorts.

33 England, 5 Ireland, 3 near the France/Belgium border and 4 on Gran Canaria

There is also a case in the ECJ at the moment around the domestic purposes exemption and CCTV. I don’t have the information to hand but IIRC they were giving it a much more restricted scope than most people thought.

My most reliable car to date is my current Berlingo (about 6 years old). It’s sailed through the last 2 MOTs with no real issues*.

However, my previous cars were two Fiats and a Renault so it’s not up against particularly tough competition…

*fingers crossed I haven’t jinxed it!

It’s depressing how formulaic these are getting. You see “London cyclist killed” and you expect a tipper truck 🙁

(In the interests of balance there is one cycle lane I use every day on my commute because it makes sense – a segregated cycle contraflow down a one way street which saves a detour round the one way system)

I have no idea why people don’t use lights. I do know why I don’t use many cycle paths though. I do use the ones which are well maintained and go where I want to go without too many give ways, gates and pedestrians. These are few and far between. I’ve tried the majority of cycle paths vaguely near my commute and have decided that the road is safer and easier as long as I ride confidently.

There is one stretch of road with a pavement cyclepath alongside it. I tend to stay on the road – it is dual carriageway but not too fast/busy and there is plenty of room for drivers to pass. The cyclepath crosses a side road (admittedly with priority although drivers don’t always pay attention), takes a detour round the back of a bus stop, and then spits you out into a junction with cars trying to turn left across you – and at my speed I tend to get there just as the lights turn green which is just about the worst timing possible. Last night the road was busy so I used it and ended up having to shout at a group of five or so people in a line across both cyclepath and the rest of the pavement with their backs to me so I could make any progress past them.

As cyclepaths go I’ve seen much worse than this one, and maybe if I wasn’t confident I would use it. But for me I’ve tried, and I know where I’d rather be.

That doesn’t mean I’m against cyclepaths by the way – just against bad ones and being compelled to use them!

I was on the ride yesterday but didn’t know him/wasn’t around when it happened. Very sad 🙁

In cash terms, my current car cost me about ¼ of my monthly take home pay.

It was slightly more complicated than that as it was a part-exchange and the two cars were very close in value (I wanted something bigger so traded in a supermini for a Berlingo). But the old car was bought for “part cash/part loan” (cost would have been between ¼ – 1/5 of my annual income that year) and the loan had been paid off by a couple of years by then. So that’s all I’ve paid in the last 4 years or so other than running costs. And those aren’t bad considering I don’t drive it much and it’s sailed through the last 2 MOTs needing nothing more than a new bulb or two.

Even if you take what I paid for the first car plus what I paid for the second car and divide it by the time since I bought the first car I’m down to about £125 per month, and that assumes that my current car has no value whatsoever. And that’s with the first car being bought new so suffering heavier depreciation. My next car will almost certainly be a second hand car bought with cash. Probably another Berlingo. I have enough cash in the bank to cover that and I can’t see it being worth much more than 10% of my annual income.

I really don’t get cars as a status symbol. Fine, if you like driving or like cars I can understand spending money on your hobby. But just to show off how much money you have? I remember one of my trainees hating the job but still being desperate to qualify so she could buy a BMW. I’m not sure I even had a car at the time (I spent a year or so experimenting with living without a car). It struck me as quite sad that she was so obsessed by material things rather than finding a job she actually enjoyed.

I don’t really drive enough to want something “nice to drive around in”. To be honest, I don’t like car culture and given I’m trying to cut down on driving miles in favour of other forms of transport it would be counter-productive to have a nice car that I wanted to drive! I eventually decided that a car was useful enough to have one, but not to spend stupid amounts of money on or get obsessed about. I think today is the first time I’ve used the car since last Tuesday.Having something that looks out of place in the office car park encourages me to cycle to work more often 😉 Similarly, something cheap stops me thinking “I’m paying so much for it that I may as well use it”.

Getting up and down to/from street level would be my concern. As well as the idea that cyclists must be hidden away leaving the outside world for drivers.

That and no gps signal for strava 😉

Hired a motorhome in italy.

Scraped it down the side of a lorry within an hour of picking it up.

€1500 deposit.

Ouch.

Before I got together with my OH my holidays were usually trips to see my parents where I’d sit by the sea with red wine and a book or city breaks. He doesn’t really like either.

I won him round by pointing out the great cycling round where my parents live and picking city breaks which coincide with bike races. Simple. It helps that I like cycling too, albeit not quite to the extent that he does.

We have done an all inclusive package as a base for cycling. 11 of my family were going so it needed to be kid/grandparent friendly but a couple of rides into the mountains kept us sane 🙂

Saturday -40 miles, 1000m of climb in gran canaria (road bike). Sunshine, blue skies, green valleys, pizza and beer on the beach at the end

Sunday – 10k race (running). Pizza and red wine on the beach at the end. First day off the bike all week.

Fly home today 🙁

I leave mine in the cupboard where my files live. I did have a bit of a rant a couple of years ago when it snowed – they said all laptop users had to take their laptops home so they could work from home rather than being snowed in. I pointed out that as I can get to work on foot (although i usually cycle) the one thing that would stop me getting in would be carrying a heavy laptop with me…

My mum does (present from me) and for her it makes sense. Just recovering from a course of chemo, mainly walking for exercise and interested in tracking steps/sleep quality. I wore it for a day (she struggled to get it set up so I did it and tested it before I handed it back) and it didn’t work as well for me particularly with cycling. She seems to like it now though.

Yes but only down dirt roads. The road cycling is normally too good to tempt me off road though!

13.5 years

Hmm. One mtb, three proper road bikes, a drop barred fixie and a drop barred commuter with chunky tyres.

Gran Canaria (road) 😆

Just need to find my summer cycling kit first…

The long stay parking at east midlands is across thhe road and easily walkable. The confirmation says 3-5 minutes walk which tallies with my recollection from last time we used it. We paid about £40 for 10 days starting on Saturday.

I was the only person I saw cycling into leeds from my direction. Managed to stay on the bike but there were a few involuntary swerves.

Having only had 4.5 hours sleep after getting home past 2am it certainly woke me up!

I did a one way ride from the north to the south of fuerteventura with a strong tail wind all the way. It was great! The first time we rode there we did an out and back and rather underestimated the wind so made sure we planned the next ride a little better…

England, wales, scotland, northern Ireland. Ireland, France, Belgium, Italy, spain on my bikes.

USA on a hire bike.

I’m not, I’m going to watch 6 day racing in Bremen instead.

Relatively pleasant – a 7 mile run with only a few slippy bits. I left the bike at wor last night so will cycle home at the end of the day 🙂 That is likely to be more traumatic as the traffic is so much worse than it was last week and I need to readjust to idiot drivers 🙁

I’m currently doing the post-Christmas waiting game too. No strong hints either way, just a promise that I’d hear “after the new year” (my 2nd interview was the Friday before Christmas). Just wish they’d get a move on!

I have to say that when I was knocked off my bike by an idiot driver I was very impressed by how many people immediately stopped to help. One person not only gave me and my bike a lift home (I felt OK enough to go home rather than to hospital but the bike was a write off so I needed help getting there) but then popped back round later in the day on his way home to check that I was OK. I’d like to think that I’d do something similar if I saw someone who needed help.

I’m out there for 10 days from the 17th. My parents live out there and I have a road bike in their garage. All the free motion routes are good ones and cover most of the options from playa – because of the mountains there are only a certain number of places you can get across them to do a loop rather than an out and back (although I tend to do Soria as an out and back anyway).

I have access to a van so try to do some riding in the north too but there’s plenty in the south to keep you occupied for a week. My favoutite climb is the one at the back of mogan towards the tauropass/press de las ninas.

Gah. My clients have woken up. Just had to do a 40 minute phone call 🙁

Can I go back to sleep now?

Yup, I’ve received one work related email all day and everything I’ve sent out has got an out of office message in response. I’m not sure I’ve heard a phone ringing so far today.

My OH worked Monday – Wednesday but is off today because so many people were taking the day off that they just decided to close. Rather jealous.

Back from pizza express full of food and prosecco. Now trying to decide whether to put a film on or whether we will fall asleep before the end.

We never make too big a thing of it but we are going to head out and have a pizza before retreating home well before midnight.

Usualy I let it go. I know from their driving that they are ****s and that I’d rather not get into a “discussion” with them. If I catch them up again I tend not to go back past them so they don’t get to do it again.

Occasionally I do a hand wave as they disappear into the distance and I have a hard stare for people who encroach into ASLs but otherwise I try to stay zen. Even if that does occasionally involve taking a moment by the side of the road to calm back down.

I got the bike shop and cafe. Already have the camper van at home 😀

I just tend to have the one and eat it first so I can enjoy the rest of my meal…

Bacon and sausage sandwiches