What We Do
Here we are ready to head out in the morning. Note the lack of Spandex!
Our Philosophy
Our philosophy around cycle touring is pretty simple: we go to beautiful places and we don’t go fast. In fact, some people would say that we’re downright slow. Hence the name SlowCycle. We go slow because we like it that way. You can take to time to enjoy the countryside, the people, take pleasure in the small things and to savor the sights and attractions along the way. Try it, the slower you go, the more you’ll see, and more you’ll enjoy it.
What’s slow? Well, we like a daily ride of something like 40 - 50 km. We’ll do more if need be, but we avoid it if we can. We don’t start out particularly early in the morning, and like to get in in the evening early enough to freshen up an bit and have a look at where we are before the evening’s activities. And we really like a good dinner, good wine and a comfortable bed at the end of the day.
We avoid traffic and hills, in that order. We detest riding in traffic, and we go to great lengths to stay away from that. Sometimes you just can’t, and when that happens we do it, but we still don’t like it.
We avoid hills when we can, although we’ll choose a good climb over 5 km of heavy traffic any day. Hills are part of cycling and often you can’t avoid them altogether, but neither do we seek them out.
We also travel independently, that is, we design our own routes, we make our own arrangements for lodging and other things, we rent bicycles at the start of the trip, and return them at the end. We carry everything with us, we don’t bother with baggage transfer.
In the spirit of SlowCycle, we also try to spend two or more nights at most of the places along the way. We don’t like to travel every day, so our tours are designed to take advantage of overnight stays that offer points of interest or other things to do if you’re not riding to your next destination. Typically, this is a day ride, a hike, or often just a visit to the town or area where you’ve spent the night.
Likewise, sometimes we’ll take a relatively short ride to the next stopping point, say 20 km or so, to allow us to have an afternoon dedicated to a particular visit or other activity.
No Spandex. Slow down and savor. That’s how we like it.
