I came rather late to this party. Anna Hughes cycled 4000 miles around the coast of Great Britain in 2011 and this book – her account of that epic journey – was published in 2015. I only discovered it late in 2025, but the time gap doesn’t matter because the things she focuses on – the landscapes, the weather, her personal highs and lows, are as valid now as they were then.

Each day of the 72 days of her journey is a separate chapter, but far from being a repetitive turn-of-the-pedals account Hughes’ fluent and easy (I suspect deceptively easy) style ensures the reader looks forward to each new day, eager to discover what the next miles bring.

What appealed to me most was the number of times I found myself nodding vigorously in agreement with her descriptions of places and experiences I know myself. Although I’ve hardly cycled any of the coastline I’ve visited a lot of it on foot or by car, and my times spent in the hills and mountains means I can share Hughes’ exhilaration – and exhaustion – with making progress through the landscapes and the weather, good or bad. There are days which just flow by and you feel you could go on for ever, and then there are days when you just don’t want to set off and your morale stays at rock bottom all day.

I was amused reading the five days she took to ride from Minehead to Plymouth, a journey which walking the South-West Coast Path has taken me forty! And I sympathised with the twelve consistently unpleasant days as she cycled round the coast of Wales: that country has been like that for me too. I have a strong feeling that if Anna Hughes and I were to sit down to fish and chips in a pub somewhere with her book in front of us we would still be comparing notes and sharing experiences at closing time.

So belated congratulations on your achievement, Anna. I enjoyed the ride!

Matsuo Bashō was a 17th Century Japanese poet considered to be a master of the haiku, a traditional form of poem written in three sections of five, seven and five syllables. In his comprehensive introduction translator Yuasa traces the history of the haiku through the preceding centuries showing how it developed from earlier forms and through the concept of ‘linked verses’ into the mature form it achieved in Bashō’s time.

This collection of Bashō’s works consists of Yuasa’s introduction followed by five of Bashō’s accounts of his travels:

• The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton
• A Visit to the Kashima Shrine
• The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel
• A Visit to Sarashina Village
• The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Bashō himself and the world he describes seems completely alien to a 21st Century Western reader. It is a world where an ascetic with few material needs travels on foot or horseback with the sole purpose of seeking out beauty and harmony. He could travel for several days just to admire the cherry blossom at a particular shrine, or to see the full moon rise over a single pine tree – perhaps one made famous by an earlier painter – or to contemplate the serenity of islands scattered in a bay.

For food and lodging he relied on inns, farms, priests, the hospitality of villagers, fisherman and the like, or of friends, often poets or artists themselves. He might spend several days with a fellow poet, exchanging haikus and composing linked verses. Against the background of undeveloped 16th century rural Japan the journeys he made are astonishing, though it’s hard for us now to imagine the full reality.

Reading ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’, which I thought was the best of the collection, I was reminded of Jack Kerouac and ‘The Dharma Bums’. Kerouac was deeply interested in Zen Buddhism and haiku poetry, which feature strongly in that novel. Kerouac doesn’t mention Bashō in ‘Dharma Bums’ although he does reference the earlier (9th century) Chinese poet Hanshan and his ‘Cold Mountain’ poetry. I think Bashō’s travels would have appealed to Kerouac.

Title: Gironimo
Author: Moore, Tim
Published by: Yellow Jersey Press
Year: 2015
First published: Yellow Jersey Press, 2014
Date reviewed: 03.23
ISBN: 9780224100151

This is the fourth of Tim Moore’s books that I’ve read, and the ninth he has published. My reading is definitely non-sequential though: I read ‘French Revolutions‘, his third, in 2002; his tenth, ‘The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold‘ in 2017 and his eleventh, ‘Another Fine Mess‘ in 2020.

‘Gironimo‘, like ‘French Revolutions‘ and ‘The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold‘, is the story of an epic bike ride; this time he rides the route of what is claimed to be the hardest-ever edition of the Giro^*. He does it on bike of similar vintage to the 1914 Giro he is replicating, as authentic as he could make it, down to the wooden wheel rims and brake blocks fashioned out of bottle corks.

As crazy ventures go this is what we expect from Moore as he lurches from one breakdown to the next, one repair shop to another (when he can find one), as his narrative cuts between his own adventures and the historical record of the 1914 tour and its suffering riders. It’s makes an interesting read, but for me neither as engaging nor laugh-out-loud funny as his other cycling stories I have read.

* The Giro d’Italia, the Italian equivalent of the Tour de France.

Across the USA in a Ford Model T

Tim Moore is a travel writer who specialises in coming up with daft ideas, doing them, and then writing about them. Never having driven one before, his daft idea for 2018 was to drive a 1924 Model T Ford across the USA from coast to coast. I’ve never driven one either, but from the book I now know that the controls are absolutely nothing like what we now regard as conventional. It’s said to take 1000 miles or a lifetime, whichever is shorter, to master them.

There’s an agenda behind this trip. Baffled by Americans electing Donald Trump as President, Moore wants to cross the country entirely in Republican-voting areas in an attempt to understand how this could happen. His research found that it was possible to do this – a red line of Republican voting from one coast to the other which determined his route. (But Tim, why NO MAP in the book?)

His journey is a tale of breakdowns, junk food, and a network of ‘old car guys’ who unstintingly help get him back on the road. He gets to know staunchly independent-minded Republican small-town America, populated by polite, friendly, helpful people for whom the American Dream, like Moore’s Model T, has ground to a halt and (unlike the ‘T’ sometimes) gone into reverse.

Into his odyssey Moore weaves two more themes: the history of the Model T and the role it played in changing just about every aspect of life in the USA as million after million units of affordable transport rolled off Ford’s innovative production lines; and the story of Henry Ford himself. Henry was a conflicted man – a pacifist whose ruthless pursuit of efficiency was admired by Adolf Hitler, a perfectionist who preferred to hire unqualified people even for senior positions, a visionary who realised his vision but couldn’t adapt when the world moved on, an authoritarian who employed his own enforcers to spy on and discipline his workforce but who famously created the consumer society by raising his factory workers’ pay to $5 an hour, which meant they could afford to buy the cars they were making.

Probably because of the purpose behind Moore’s journey this book doesn’t have many of the laugh-out-loud moments of others I’ve read by him although the humour is still there. The lasting impressions I have are of the kindness and warm hearts of the people he meets, the impact of the Model T and then its successors on American society, and how the American Dream of ever-increasing prosperity and material comfort went rancid as industry and agriculture, the foundations of the 20th century US economy, stuttered, stalled and declined.

Emma John trained as a classical violinist but abandoned any plans for a music career in her twenties when she realised she wasn’t quite good enough to play at the very highest level. She became a journalist and sports writer living in London and making the most of a young and active lifestyle in the city. Her violin spent years in its case gathering dust in the corner.

Then by a series of chances she stumbled across the bluegrass music of the American South. Bluegrass is fast-paced, played in small groups of string instruments – in its purest form a banjo, mandolin, guitar, bass and fiddle (violin). Cutting to the point of the story she decided to immerse herself in this music and learn to be a bluegrass fiddler.

So ‘Wayfaring Stranger’ is the story of how she fell in love with the music, people and landscapes of the Bluegrass. It’s heartwarming and funny; a travelogue, musical coming-of-age drama and social anthropological study all in one. Emma John writes honestly about how she struggled with disappointment and self-doubt as her efforts to overcome the inhibitions of her classical training seemed hopeless.

Along the way she writes about the history of bluegrass and the characters who defined the music. For them, and the people she meets who (mostly) willingly give her their time, encouragement and support, bluegrass is not just a musical genre. It is embedded in the culture of the region; it is part of them and they are part of it.

I enjoyed this book and recommend it.

It’s sixteen years since I read and reviewed Tim Moore’s “French Revolutions“, his first cycling book. Since then he’s written several other books including one about the notorious 1914 Giro d’Italia, “Gironimo”, in which he rides a vintage bike around the route of the race.

In “The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold” he is back on a classic rather than vintage bike, an East German Mifa shopping bike with 20-inch wheels and in most versions an open folding frame guaranteed to collapse. Fortunately he managed to find a non-folder, and someone to add a top bar for strength.

I first picked up the tale from his blog while he was riding south through the Finnish winter. Fascinated by this clear madness and remembering I’d enjoyed “French Revolutions” I followed his story. It turned out he planned to cycle on his Mifa from the north of Finland to the Black Sea coast along the line of the old Iron Curtain, a route sketchily defined as the Eurovélo 13.

Riding the Mifa means plenty of cycling episodes, but that’s not the main point of the book. It’s much more a social commentary on the various countries Moore passes through and how they have fared since the break-up of communist eastern Europe. He draws on historical sources and his own experiences of travelling through eastern Europe shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall.

Criss-crossing the national borders along the route he meets people whose lives have been caught up in the sweeping historical and political changes in this part of the world. They range from taciturn and depressed to jovial and exuberant, depending on how the post-war years have treated them. The country that an exhausted, hungry endurance shopping-bike cyclist found most enjoyable? Surprisingly – Serbia!

Although his crazy journey could have suddenly ended at any time, he made it to the end – about 10,000km on a stupid bike. I liked the book. Oh, and I almost forgot to say — it’s very funny!

Title: Spain to Norway on a Bike Called Reggie
Author: Sykes, Andrew P
Published by: Summersdale
Year: 2017
First published: Summersdale, 2017
Date reviewed: 06.17
ISBN: 978-1-78685-170-3 (Kindle edition)

It tells the story of his solo bike ride in 2015 from the southernmost tip of Europe, Tarifa in Spain, to its northernmost point, Nordkapp in Norway. He covered 7500km in just under 100 days. In a change from his previous book he has abandoned the straightjacket of a one-chapter-a-day format. Instead he writes one chapter for each degree of latitude he completes – all 35 of them. This gives him more flexibility to be selective in what he writes.

So we get a mix of his cycling experiences: the weather and the terrain; food, hotels and campsites; some well-chosen snippets of history; descriptions and stories about some of the people he meets along the way. As anyone who’s ever done a long-distance bike ride knows, each of these can become important at some point. Sykes’ self-deprecating and sometimes quirky humour is still there, more natural and less forced than in “Along the Med” – that editor again, I guess. His travelling style is still the same though. He has an overall plan and a general idea about his route, but each day’s ride is taken as it comes rather than being meticulously planned.

I started identifying with Andrew as he got further north in Norway, as a long time ago I did a five week ride in Sweden and Norway when the central part of the peninsula was genuinely remote. In fact his track and mine coincided for a short section somewhere between Lillehammer and Trondheim. I can appreciate how it must feel to be riding into the wind and rain in the far north, wondering where the next opportunity will be to dry out and buy some food and a hot drink. At least on my journey I didn’t have to face the tunnels – I didn’t come across any (if indeed any had been built then).

Well-deserved congratulations to Andrew. It was an innovative challenge and an epic ride, and he kept going even when his spirits were low on those ‘Mercedes days’. Writing this in the summer of 2017 I can’t overlook an unwritten message in the book; he did the whole journey without formalities or a single delay at any of the national borders. Let’s hope that’s still possible in 2020.

An account of a cycle ride across China. Hugely disappointing; badly written and with all the faults of an unedited self-published book. A missed opportunity.

This review puts me in a dilemma. How honest should I be? Let me explain.

I first came across Andrew P Sykes in the summer of 2015 while he was blogging his bike ride from Tarifa, at the southern tip of Spain, to Nordkapp (North Cape) in the far north of Norway. An epic ride! I followed him on twitter and after one or two exchanges he followed me back. We’ve had several conversations since, and I think of him as someone I ‘know’. I don’t want to upset him.

On the other hand I do feel I ought to be honest in these reviews, otherwise what’s the point? So Andrew, when you’re reading this — as I expect you will — don’t panic! I liked the book. But I think there are things about it that could have been better. Here’s my review.

How does a failed trainee accountant turned secondary school French teacher fill his summer holidays? By cycling from the south-east corner of Greece to the south-west corner of Portugal, of course. 50 days’ cycling through 10 countries, 9 rest days and over 5500 kilometres go into this book. Unlike some other writers in this genre Sykes has chosen to write a short chapter for each day of his journey. It’s a difficult self-imposed discipline: it made me think of someone walking along a pebbly beach picking up a pebble determined to find something interesting about it before dropping it and picking up the next. In this case it mostly works, but it makes the book quite long and perhaps smooths out the contrasts between the highs and lows of the journey.

What does come through is Sykes’ own personality. He had no real plan for his journey, deciding more or less day by day where to head for and where to stay, taking each day as it came. As he says, he prefers not to know too much about the road ahead; if it looks too challenging it can sometimes be hard to get motivated. He’s not quite carefree, but confident enough to cope with uncertainty and make the best of things. He gets serious about some things (the environment), flippant about others (odd place names), and takes time to give some background and history of the places he visits and people he meets. His bike, personified as Reggie, sometimes acts as the foil to Sykes’ self-deprecating humour.

It’s a shame he couldn’t find a publisher; this book is self-published. I think the book suffers a bit from not having a publisher’s editor involved. I would have welcomed some pictures and maps but presumably cost ruled them out, which is a pity because there are some great pictures on his Tarifa – Nordkapp blog.

But none of this detracts from Sykes’ achievement. It was a great ride, and an honest account of it. There’s plenty to enjoy as you share the ups and downs, meet the characters and explore the places. I want to go to Ubeda and stay in the Neuve Leyendas hotel with its delightful owners. And I want to read the Tarifa – Nordkapp book when it comes out.

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California and grew up near the Pacific coast where many of his earlier successful novels and stories are based. He later moved to New York and by 1960 had been living there for some time when wanderlust gripped him. He felt he had lost touch with the America and Americans whose lives he had written about in earlier times and wanted to reconnect with them. He had a truck converted to a camper and set out on a road trip with just his ‘blue’ standard poodle Charley for company.

He doesn’t have any great adventures and this is certainly not an odyssey of rediscovery, either of himself or others. It is just a simple account of his travels and the people he meets, written in the sharp spare style for which he is admired. Fifty years on it’s more social history than travelogue. The section that will stick in the mind, though, is near the end of the book when Steinbeck travels through the southern states. 1960 was the time when the protests over desegregation and civil rights were at their height as America struggled towards racial integration. Those old enough to remember will recall the way black children were ‘bussed’ into all-white schools (Martin Luther King led the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, and the March on Washington was in 1963). Steinbeck’s account of the vitriolic and obscene behaviour of a group of women in New Orleans known as the Cheerleaders, who mounted daily protests outside white schools being forced by the Federal government to take black children, is equal to any of his earlier powerful prose.