Last night I attended a presentation about Exodus Travels cycling adventures in the Edinburgh Marriott Hotel. It consisted of some short movie clips plus a lot of slides.
My goodness, just about all of the cycling holidays featured were tempting. Croatia, South Africa, Burma, Mongolia, India, Namibia, Morocco, France, Cuba, Italy…
The guy giving the talk has a great job. He gets to go on many of these holidays (though he’s working at the same time) sometimes more than once, he gets to plan and create new cycling route holidays, and its all healthy stuff, he takes photos everywhere and then he goes to various locations to market them. The presentation was very persuasive. We saw wonderful locations, scenery and people, we saw cyclists enjoying themselves, and we saw pictures of food, wine and beer being consumed by the cyclists. The guy said that the food in Cuba wasn’t so great because there was too much lobster! He told us that lobsters were only for tourists, and banned for the locals.
I had previously looked at the company’s cycling brochure, and seen itineraries such as: Day 1 – 60kms, Day 2 – 80kms, Day 3 – 40kms, etc, and thought, well that’s too much for me. But the guy explained that nearly all of the trips are supported by vehicles, and if you feel that you are too tired or sore to continue at any point, you can hop in the support vehicle. In Morocco, the support vehicles are Landrovers and there tends to be more than one of them (depending on the number of cyclists), so if you get fed up cycling, you can say, “I’ve had enough. Take me on to the hotel and the swimming pool” and they can do that there and then because there are other vehicles still supporting the remaining cyclists. That’s for me!
So, I’ll need to save up my Pounds, Groats, Euros or whatever the currency may be in the future here in Scotland.
Stimulated by the talk, I got on my bike today and cycled to Longniddry via various other places. I’ve cycled quite a bit around Edinburgh over the years and especially since I retired, and it never fails to amaze me that I can end up on roads and tracks that I’ve never been on before, and take photos, like the one below, of things that I’ve not seen before.
This was probably built to stop the Germans
I think I cycled about 45kms today. Exodus’ Atlas Descent cycling holiday in Morocco sounds very good, especially the ‘descent’ bit. It’s longest day is 75kms, so I’ll have to keep at it.
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