Foghat
Freight-train-groove-rider
Recently, I developed a hankering for two cycling route guides I'd first owned in the early 1980s, when I started cycling in earnest, but since mislaid. Cycling seemed a hard sport/pastime in the early days, especially hills, and I'd concluded touring would be my thing, as racing seemed to be beyond me.
But then I started getting stronger, realised I was actually reasonably good, including on hills. So I got into fast/hard/endurance riding, searching out all the hilly terrain in Britain, then the Alps, and eventually started racing. Somehow those two route guide books got cut adrift, although I continued to explore Britain's roads.....and I would make my own routes from Ordnance Survey maps.
Later, after I stopped racing, I would eagerly acquire great rafts of more modern route guides.....partly to identify new places to ride, partly to remind myself about the areas I'd already explored.
But those two books stayed in my consciousness, and the urge to re-acquire them, and to recapture that part of my youth, kept growing, until I finally decided to hunt them down.....and bought them from Abe Books for the princely total sum of £6. They're in great condition, despite being nearly 40 years old, and exactly as I remember them. The first thing I did was to locate the reference to Cheesefoot Head in the CTC Route Guide, as that book was the first time I'd heard of it, or known it was the huge natural amphitheatre in the South Downs where Eisenhower addressed the Allied troops just before they set off on the D-Day missions. I then went looking for the references in Weekend Cycling to Fat Betty on the Hutton-le-Hole route that I recalled from all those years ago.
The route maps are quaintly simple by today's standards, as is much of the cycle-touring guidance and advice within. And the routes make more use of A roads than would be considered acceptable in today's levels of motorised traffic. But somehow they still have a unique fascination as a reminder of a virtually bygone era of route representation and promulgation, and I've spent several hours perusing them again.
Anyone else got these, or similar style old-fashioned cycling route guides, perhaps from even further back in time?
But then I started getting stronger, realised I was actually reasonably good, including on hills. So I got into fast/hard/endurance riding, searching out all the hilly terrain in Britain, then the Alps, and eventually started racing. Somehow those two route guide books got cut adrift, although I continued to explore Britain's roads.....and I would make my own routes from Ordnance Survey maps.
Later, after I stopped racing, I would eagerly acquire great rafts of more modern route guides.....partly to identify new places to ride, partly to remind myself about the areas I'd already explored.
But those two books stayed in my consciousness, and the urge to re-acquire them, and to recapture that part of my youth, kept growing, until I finally decided to hunt them down.....and bought them from Abe Books for the princely total sum of £6. They're in great condition, despite being nearly 40 years old, and exactly as I remember them. The first thing I did was to locate the reference to Cheesefoot Head in the CTC Route Guide, as that book was the first time I'd heard of it, or known it was the huge natural amphitheatre in the South Downs where Eisenhower addressed the Allied troops just before they set off on the D-Day missions. I then went looking for the references in Weekend Cycling to Fat Betty on the Hutton-le-Hole route that I recalled from all those years ago.
The route maps are quaintly simple by today's standards, as is much of the cycle-touring guidance and advice within. And the routes make more use of A roads than would be considered acceptable in today's levels of motorised traffic. But somehow they still have a unique fascination as a reminder of a virtually bygone era of route representation and promulgation, and I've spent several hours perusing them again.
Anyone else got these, or similar style old-fashioned cycling route guides, perhaps from even further back in time?
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