The Thousand Mile Bike-Ride

Well, actually a whole lot more than 1,000 miles!

In 1960, when we were sixteen, I biked with six friends from Cheshire ‘around the North Sea’. The photo shows us just about to start the journey from the house of one of the party, Pat Cross, in Rowton near Chester. The members of the party are (from left) Tony Male, Chris Sumner, Roger Wilkinson, Bruce Colenso, Keith Johnson, and Pat Cross.

The trip took us about 4 weeks. Somewhere in Schleswig Holstein, I smeared my fingers in oil from my bike chain (or in Cheshire dialect 'bletch') and wrote '1,000 miles to Chester' on an otherwise immaculately clean German distance marker.

We travelled between 80 and 120 miles per day, staying in youth hostels that we had pre-booked. The journey took us through the Welsh Borders and then across to Dover. Landing in Ostend, we happily cycled unknowingly down the Ostend to Bruges motorway (such things were a mystery to us and we confused the horn-tooting for encouragement rather than irritation).

Then on through the Netherlands and Northern Germany and up into Denmark. Thence we took the ferry across from Fredrikshavn to Goteborg and on to Oslo. And back home from Newcastle through the Yorkshire Dales.

On my visit to England in October 2009, I caught up with Chris Sumner at a dinner hosted by Bruce Colenso, and Chris still retains his Youth Hostels Association card with all the various hostel stamps.

My overriding memories are of quiet, relatively flat roads, pine forests and occasional road houses serving fried potatoes and wurst. The hostels that still come to mind are those of Vught, Werden Aller and Aabenraa. At the first of these, the warden woke the dormitories in the early morning by playing his guitar and singing Dutch folk songs.

In Aabenraa, we were at first mistaken for Germans being much more noisy and self-involved than the locals but the Danes brought us apples and sweets when they found out that we were English – shades of WWII. Denmark was also the scene of an unfortunate reaction of my young stomach to a Danish pastry and a Carlsberg beer – wow, how about that for exotic back in 1960!

I owe the photo to Bruce Colenso who has made three successive summer visits to Wellington with his wife Shirley – and whom we hosted for a meal a week or so ago. The second photo shows me with Bruce in Island Bay in 2009 – we haven’t changed a bit!