#3: Pedalling through time

For the last four years, I've gone on a bike trip with my dad and brothers. It's something that means a lot to me, and I cherish every year we get to keep doing it.

What I love about cycling is this:

I love the feeling of being one with the bike, a human-bike hybrid, whizzing downhill, choosing whether to soar in a straight line or whether to snake in a needless wobbly line. I love I only have to think of it and the bike seems to magically do what I think.

I love the pace. Its faster than hiking, so you move through many landscapes and vistas over the course of a day, but its slower than a car, so you aren't a passive observer missing the details - you can take in the smells and the sounds, the different plants and flowers, the washing on people's lines, all the different birds flitting in the sidelines.

I love our breakfasts, that little buffer of comfort before the journey; and the dinners, where we finish a good day's cycling and get into our civilian clothes, eat and explore where we have found ourselves.

I love filming the journey with my GoPro on my helmet, and the joy it brings my dad when I put the film together, telling a story with the edit, letting go of the uphill struggles, the mundane logistics, the exhaustion, the discomfort. I get to see a journey in double - the real 3-Dimensional experience, and the journey I know is being captured by the camera, which will need to be coaxed into a vibrancy that hints at the truth. I use music to explain the narrative arc of the trip, and speed up the footage by 10x, so that we flow through the landscape like players on MarioKart. I love the timelapses of sunsets and of us eating our meals. in time, the film becomes the memory and keeps us from the constant act of forgetting.

I love the transitions - the ferry crossings, the bridges between one landmass and another. These things are the beginnings and ending of chapters of our adventures.

I love that I get to put everything down and keep the pace of the cyclist. One pedal turn followed by the next, a simple cyclical motion that brings me from my starting place to my destination. I can't do anything else - its just me, my cycling companions, the landscape, and my legs turning on the pedals.

I've always loved maps, and I think I know when that love began. My uncle James sat with me on his lap, looking through my new World Atlas (which had a very different map of Europe than today). But I also love the way that a plotted journey on a map is so different to that journey in reality. The unexpectedness of a trip's highlights - they can come from anywhere. On my 2026 nike trip up the est coast of Scotland, I knew fromn the map that we'd pass by RSPB Fowlsleigh, but what I didn't know is what it would feel like to be there, to experience immense cliffs covered in hundreds of thousands of seabirds; the intense noise, the overpowering smell, the crashing of the waves, and the joy of spotting puffins with your own eyes.

There are other reasons that I cherish these trips. I know that one day they will end, and that I will look back with fondness and a great painful longing for these times; I will be glad of every mile we spent together. The films will make me cry my eyes out, and bring me comfort too. Maybe I will take up the reigns and my own children will join me on bike trips, or maybe we will walk, or even just drive; it doesn't matter, its the being together that makes it special, and the memories that remain.

Then there's the story that I can't tell, so I won't... Of the first bike trip, where we had an extra member of the party, how everything blew up and ended with a violent encounter. How I left early, and took the long journey home by train and plane, heartbroken. How I totally lost myself after that, truly felt for a while that the universe hated me. How the healing began when my dad asked me if I wanted to join him on a bike trip again, while we walked by the River Tay through Birnham Wood . How I saw that he didn't blame be for what happened. How I learned by getting back on the bike and being there, on a challenging trip from Campbltown to Inverness, that I am a good person to have with you on a trip, a positive force. Every trip heals that day of wounding trauma, that monster from the past. Every turn of the pedals pushes us forward and makes things right again.