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Learning to ride in Spain
Lytchett Manor Striders, Poole – Dave’s running club.
Kayaking
from Cornwall back to Dorset,
summer 2007
Cycling
around Wareham
Forest – using the
trailer for the first time.
The
trailer was later sold before we left.
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I was fortunate enough to
have been brought up in a small-whitewashed village in Andalusia, in the
south of Spain
in the 1970’s. From an early age I
was always a keen cyclist and I have very fond memories of learning to ride
my bike, cycling down the street with old Spanish ladies sitting on their
doorsteps knitting and chatting away. In those days the narrow streets had
very few cars on them and old men with their donkeys coming back from the
fields were a common sight. It was a
very safe environment to grow up in, where children could play on the
street without parents worrying about their whereabouts and all the doors
on the street were always open till late in the night, everybody knew
everybody and people were always friendly and would always stop for a
chat.
Once I learnt to ride my
bike I would spend hours on it, cycling around the village with my friends
and slowly venturing further
afield to visit friends in other villages and exploring
the beautiful surrounding areas nearby.
As I grew older I started to wonder what it would be like to go on a
cycling trip, often I would look at my Dad’s big map of Spain, the names of
all the different cities, towns and villages fascinated me and I had
visions of cycling and exploring the hidden corners of this large and
varied country.
At the age of eighteen I
returned to UK
to join the Royal Marines, with whom I served for six years. During this
time I carried on pursuing my love of cycling by taking part in numerous
Mountain Bike races.
Leaving the Royal Marines
in 1997 I went to work on a Raleigh International Expedition down in Chile. I
also had the opportunity to travel extensively around Patagonia and
immediately fell in love with this remote area of South
America.
During 1998 and 1999 I
worked in California as an outdoor
instructor taking teenagers on backpacking trips to the beautiful wilderness
areas of Northern California.
I then returned to the UK and worked in London doing security work at various
renowned five-star hotels. Working in London
was not really my idea of living and therefore decided to get a job with
Explore (www.explore.co.uk) a leading adventure travel company and was
lucky enough to lead trips for them in Spain,
Peru and Cuba. In Peru I met
my girlfriend Kelly who was also working as a tour leader for Explore.
The idea of cycling around Spain was
always at the back of my mind, but due to different circumstances I had
never really thought that I would ever carry this out. However, in May 2003
Kelly and I, at last, decided to fly to Bilbao in the north of Spain. From
there we planned to cycle into the Pyrenees and work our way along the
“Camino de Santiago” and then south along the coast of Galicia and along the Portuguese coast to Malaga. What started,
as a simple childhood dream had become a reality.
After our trip around Spain and Portugal we both had become
addicted to cycling and we both joked about going off to cycle the world. After
returning to the UK
I began working for the RNLI as a First Aid and Sea survival trainer. Slowly
the dream of carrying on cycling faded away. However, it was always at the
back of our minds and after having bad days at work we would often refer
back to it. Five years later we have now decided it is time to carry on
following our dream, as we have reached a point in our lives which we have
decided it’s now or never.
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