We only have another couple of weeks together as a family before our eldest heads back to start his sophomore year at college in Texas. Our youngest finished school last week, so my wife suggested that I take the week off and do something with both of the boys. Now that they are both into road cycling, the obvious ‘something’ was to plan a big bike ride. I wanted a distance that would be achievable for everyone, but significant enough to justify getting away somewhere. So I dug into the archives and decided to recreate the Berkhamsted Cycling Club Isle of Wight trip of 2022.
After packing our bags and putting the bike carriers on the car on Sunday, we set off early on Monday morning for a drive to Winchester. We got there just before 11am, found a pleasingly not-too-busy park-and-ride car park and unloaded the bikes. Our plan was to ride 53 km before stopping for lunch at The Bush Inn in Ovington.
The route took us through some winding alleys before heading onto lovely country lanes. The weather was perfect — hot, but not crazy hot — and we soon found ourselves wheeling into Ovington and the welcoming, beautiful pub garden. I introduced my youngest son to a mud, a 50:50 mix of orange juice and Diet Coke, which is a hundred times better than it sounds and is a finely-tuned refreshment for a summer’s ride. After lunch, we made our way back to the car park, got the bikes back on the roof and headed off to Portsmouth.
We stayed at the Holiday Inn Express in Gunwharf Quays, which is ideally situated next to a smart shopping centre with lots of choices of places to eat, albeit the same high-street names that you find everywhere. The hotel staff had no problem with us bringing our bikes in and leaving them in our rooms. I had to leave the boys with all of our unloaded bikes and bags before I drove off into the underground car park, finding a different route to get back to them. We found somewhere outdoors where we could sit and have a pizza. Afterwards, the boys wanted to go back to their room and relax. I did the same; I attempted to catch up with some Patreon videos, but fell asleep after about twenty minutes and decided to go to bed. Given that we were planning to get up just after 6am the next day, this turned out to be a great idea.
After an early breakfast and a check that everyone was feeling fit, we cycled the short distance to the Wightlink ferry terminal. I knew that our planned 110 km loop from Fishbourne, clockwise around the island, was a little daunting for both of the boys. It was to be the longest ride my eldest son had tackled, and my youngest hadn’t ridden this kind of distance since Easter. But we were all looking forward to it.
The route was spot-on. There were plenty of hills, most of which the boys sprinted up, then waited at the top for me to catch them up. We made a pit stop about 38 km into the ride at Ventnor Botanic Garden for a cold drink and a cake, which came at just the right time. The garden is at the bottom of a street called Zig Zag Road, which indicated a rapid descent as well as a difficult climb back out.
The next section of the ride was my favourite, zipping along the main road with big climbs and stunning views of the white cliffs at the south-west edge of the island. At some point one of the boys made me smile when they said, “I’m really enjoying this.” Me too.
Our planned lunch stop was 73 km in, at Off The Rails in Yarmouth. I had great memories of the food from when we did the trip with the bike club four years ago and had been excited for the boys to experience it too. We arrived hungry, parked our bikes up — and then our hearts sank as we found that it is only open from Wednesday to Sunday. We figured that we would go back up to the main road that we had just turned off, to look for somewhere else to eat. After exploring a couple of pubs and finding that they weren’t happy for us to bring our bikes through to the gardens, we settled on The Gossips Café. They had a gigantic menu and bench-style seating adjacent to the street, which allowed us to prop up our bikes against a fence and keep them within arm’s reach while we ate.
Tackling the last part of the ride was tough, with so much distance and climbing in our legs already. We had an enforced stop at Cowes Floating Bridge as we waited for the chain ferry to reach us. After that, it wasn’t long before we were rolling down the hill to catch the return ferry from Fishbourne.
A couple of weeks ago, on a Saturday morning club ride, I was introducing myself to someone in our group who I hadn’t ridden with before. I pointed out that my son was just ahead in our group, and she exclaimed “Wow, that’s the dream!” I think it took her pointing it out to me to realise that she’s absolutely right — it’s great that the boys are into something that I love, and we get to do it together. I feel so lucky to have been able to make some memories with both of the boys for a couple of days. We drove home happy.
The rest of the week was filled with a few chores such as getting our oven professionally cleaned and dropping off a replacement rim and a set of spokes at the bike shop so that they could build me a new wheel to replace the cracked one that they had pointed out to me when I last visited. I also took the time to get out of the house on my own, wandering to The Rex to see the matinee showing of The Invite (2026), which was just as funny as I had hoped it would be. Superb casting and excellent dialogue. I had such a good time that later that evening I decided to watch another film: Shithouse (2020), which was showing as a suggestion on MUBI. Despite the movie being about the experience of someone in their first year at college, I couldn’t tempt my eldest son to join me in watching it. I rounded off the day by sitting down and finishing my book. A day like this gives me hope that I’ll be just fine when it’s time to retire.
Media
Podcasts
- Quiet Riot’s ‘B-side’ episode on Nigel Farage and Reform UK is excellent. There are a bunch of people who will vote for the party whatever happens, but solid investigative journalism of the kind that the episode’s guest, Josiah Mortimer, gets on with, will surely go some way to changing the minds of a few.
Articles
- I keep thinking about Alice Bartlett’s message in her weeknotes from a few weeks ago:
Please don’t “use AI to polish” your blog posts. It makes them sound like every other blog post on the internet and therefore makes them very boring to read. I like your idiosyncratic little voice ok? Your silly little grammars. You’re the only you there is.
- I use both ChatGPT and Claude to review my posts before I publish them. I do trap grammatical and other errors, but I don’t make every correction that they suggest, and do try to keep the posts in my own voice. I’m not sure if I’m getting the balance right.
- It was interesting to read about a tribunal case where asking someone to turn on their camera for meetings was ruled to be disability discrimination.
- Working with colleagues from all over the world, I know that my UK passport gives me the privilege of travelling to lots of places at very short notice, without the hassle of having to go through a lengthy and costly visa procedure. It’s interesting to see how privileged this is in relation to people with passports from other countries.
Video
- Aside from seeing The Invite (2026) and Shithouse (2020), I also rewatched Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) after seeing a staged version last week. The play made me appreciate the film even more; it is a masterpiece.
- The BBC Archive YouTube channel consistently publishes fascinating videos. I loved this one from 1958 on the state of Britain’s roads, the same year that the first motorway in the country — the Preston bypass — was completed.
- Watched The Non-Actor (2025) on MUBI, an 18-minute film about a woman in the process of losing her hearing, who meets up with her ex-boyfriend’s new partner. It got me wondering how you go about rating movies like this on services such as IMDb and Letterboxd. Giving it a mark out of 10 seems strange when you look at ‘feature-length’ movies that have similar scores.
- Finished watching the Kylie documentary on Netflix. She’s a remarkable person, but I always feel that these documentaries that are made with extensive involvement of the subject tend to fall short. There generally isn’t enough critique, leaving me feeling like I’ve not got the full story.
Books
- Continued with Paolo Hewitt and John Hellier’s biography of Steve Marriott. The style of writing is still grating at times, but it is fun to learn about his early years.
Next week: A change of scenery.
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