I cycled a bit as a kid, just up to school and then a weekly bonding cycle ride to the ice cream parlour with my Dad, then when I went to uni (12 yrs ago - ouch!) and got a job I stopped. Now I work close to work (3.5 miles) so last summer I started cycling in, really got into it (to the extent that I carried on cycling in to work over winter), started doing longer journeys, then in November I signed up for the London to Paris cycle ride in June. I have been doing training and I am hugely enjoying that too. My boyfriend and I are going to sign up for the London to Brighton night ride which I'm looking forward to, plus we have a few cycling weekends planned on top.
My maternal grandmother passed away last summer (99 yrs, good old age, not at all upset, very natural etc etc) and so my Mum has been going through lots of old papers.
I always knew my Grandad (died over 15 yrs ago, aged approx 85) was a keen cyclist but I've just found out exactly how much:
He has some route cards from several cycling clubs from the late 1920s and 30s, where he had been doing time trials, in one 12 hr time trial he did a 197 mile route and came in the top 10 of the club.
In a cycling tour from 1938 he and two of his friends cycled to London from Birmingham in one day, trained it to Marseilles, ferried over to Corsica, and did an 8 day tour around the island. Luckily he had kept a photo packet of over 150 pictures and they are all labeled with the dates and where they were taken, along with a hand drawn map and log. Some of the photos are stunning.
Another tour was taken in Germany in 1939 and Grandad has kept a sort of log of the tour, in which he describes the alleged popularity (after a quick cautious look over the shoulder) of Hitler, the prevalence of the Swastika, hatred for jews and quite contrarily, some lovely encounters with the locals in BnBs. Afterwards he signed up for the TA, then got drafted in anyway. He had some horrible stories about the war, he had some horrific encounters at Dunkerque, however never started hating Germans just because of the war, and in fact once the war was over he opened a guest house and hired a German lady as a member of his staff.
Now I really want to do the Corsica tour with my boyfriend, I think it would be amazing to work out the route he did and do it again, possibly take copies of the pics and see if we can find those locations and take some comparative photos of what it was like then, and see what it's like now.
I just thought I'd share it with you all, I wasn't close enough to Grandad to know all this and understand it all, but now I feel a bit closer to him and feel inspired! (The only thing I won't be doing is riding a single speed fixed wheel like he would have had to!)
My maternal grandmother passed away last summer (99 yrs, good old age, not at all upset, very natural etc etc) and so my Mum has been going through lots of old papers.
I always knew my Grandad (died over 15 yrs ago, aged approx 85) was a keen cyclist but I've just found out exactly how much:
He has some route cards from several cycling clubs from the late 1920s and 30s, where he had been doing time trials, in one 12 hr time trial he did a 197 mile route and came in the top 10 of the club.
In a cycling tour from 1938 he and two of his friends cycled to London from Birmingham in one day, trained it to Marseilles, ferried over to Corsica, and did an 8 day tour around the island. Luckily he had kept a photo packet of over 150 pictures and they are all labeled with the dates and where they were taken, along with a hand drawn map and log. Some of the photos are stunning.
Another tour was taken in Germany in 1939 and Grandad has kept a sort of log of the tour, in which he describes the alleged popularity (after a quick cautious look over the shoulder) of Hitler, the prevalence of the Swastika, hatred for jews and quite contrarily, some lovely encounters with the locals in BnBs. Afterwards he signed up for the TA, then got drafted in anyway. He had some horrible stories about the war, he had some horrific encounters at Dunkerque, however never started hating Germans just because of the war, and in fact once the war was over he opened a guest house and hired a German lady as a member of his staff.
Now I really want to do the Corsica tour with my boyfriend, I think it would be amazing to work out the route he did and do it again, possibly take copies of the pics and see if we can find those locations and take some comparative photos of what it was like then, and see what it's like now.
I just thought I'd share it with you all, I wasn't close enough to Grandad to know all this and understand it all, but now I feel a bit closer to him and feel inspired! (The only thing I won't be doing is riding a single speed fixed wheel like he would have had to!)
