Wild adventures
with kids and bikes.

Tearing round the house as quietly as a could, I grabbed my carefully-prepared rucksack, remembering to throw in the pair of socks I forgot the day before yesterday, and disappeared out of the door. A clear, cool morning met me as I zipped through a town centre yet to rub the its eyes to greet the new day, and arrived on the platform with time to spare. Ironically, the train turned up at just the time I would like there to be one - in the middle of a half-hour-or-so gap in the timetable.

On the first day, I started the Festive 500 with my Daddy. I felt excited and determined to do 500 kilometres in 8 days. We went on roads that I knew and roads I had never been on before.

The back garden of an urban residence, especially your own, where you have neighbours to stay friends with for the longer-term, is a high-stakes place to take your baby camping for the first time they will remember. In fact, my distinct preference for such a trip is to be as far from the sight and sound of others as possible - in the wilds of Scotland worked nicely for the girls, and in Thomas Ivor’s case, it was a soggy field in mid-Wales. Campsites are less conducive to the objective, because on the one hand you want noisy neighbours so you’re not the people everyone’s glaring at in the morning, yet on the other, you want the little one to actually sleep.

…there it sits, provocatively on its stand, just waiting for a turn of the key and an immediate trip into town. It doesn’t need lights finding, or a change of footwear, never mind clothes, to ride it - and it will carry several children and a load, at the drop of a hat. Of all the bikes available to me, it’s the most useful, the most practical.

In the hall, sits a very different machine…