TRAVEL Q&A
QAny suggestions for where to get a good ride around Northamptonshire?
AStep one: get up early. Step two: ride to Wales… Being serious, while there are a lot of speed cameras in Northamptonshire, there are some great roads too. But it is a fairly small county, so it pays to look beyond its boundaries. We’d head north into Leicestershire, Rutland and Lincolnshire. But you could do a southerly loop through Buckingham, the Chilterns and the Cotswolds.
QWhat tools should I take when riding the North Coast 500 in Scotland?
AWhat tools would you take when riding to your local bike meet? If you’re on a classic bike that you know will need regular road-side repair work, take whatever you need to fix whatever might go wrong. But if you’re on a modern bike that’s in a good state of repair and running well, just take the basics – a puncturerepair kit, gaffer tape, cable ties, multi-tool and the bike’s own tool kit. And expect not to use them.
QI really like the look of the road in Andalusia that you featured in the August issue. I don’t want to take the ferry and I don’t want to fly out and hire a bike so how long do I need to get there, riding from Calais?
AIt all depends on your stamina, your budget and your appetite for sitting on a motorway. It’s 1275 mostly motorway miles from Calais to Ohanes (the village at the end of
Q Athat road), which probably means three days from most places in the UK. Getting off the motorways for a better ride would push that to maybe five days. So it’s do-able in ten days, nine at a pinch. But if you have a two-week holiday, it can done easily and entirely on fine roads. Four days off, where to go: Wales or Scotland?
It depends where you’re starting from. From the south coast, we’d pick Wales. But from the Midlands or north, we’d head to Scotland: Moffat, Inverary, Fort William, Inverness, Nairn, Grantown on Spey… brilliant.