Tynemouth

Great run this evening on a new route - into Newcastle and back: And I got to stop briefly at Carlton Reid’s cocktail bar half way round too. Unfortunately they were right out of Bambino Splash (pint glass - half fill with snakebite, and top up with snowball), but they did have water for...
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My friend Yves loves to go surfing - just down the road we have one of the best surfing beaches in the UK, Tynemouth Longsands. The thing is, there are only so many hours in the day, and to fit in his surfing, he’s often in the water at 5 a.m. But Yves also...
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If you were campaigning to improve the quality of local cycle infrastructure, is this the sort of thing that you’d be demanding? Make my journey a pleasant experience and not a daily struggle for space. Give me and other cyclists priority over motor traffic. Include sections free of motor traffic. Stop buses, lorries and cars passing too close...
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This weekend I was supposed to be doing the Coast to Coast. But unfortunately my training buddy had to go to Luxembourg for the week. So Tall Robbie and I did the Great North Bike Ride instead. I was really impressed that he was allowed out to play for this, as it was...
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Old bikes are good bikes. Not the fastest, quickest, best handling machines, but still good bikes. They feel like old friends, and like old friends, they’re just so much easier and comfortable to get along with. Take this one, that we saw in Cullercoats on Friday evening: When this beauty came past us, I just...
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We have ‘em here too: I stopped to chat to this guy on Saturday - everything that you’d want from a policeman on ‘the beat’: friendly, approachable, probably quite hard to outrun if you’re a bad’un, and on a bike. He was also quite knowledgeable about local bike shops and good routes from A to...
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It’s been a long time since I’ve ridden my road bike, Christine - last July in fact. So on Friday last week, I gave her a good spring clean and lubing. Along the way, I used the handy chain wear checking tool I bought to check her chain. Good thing too - it’d done...
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This probably isn’t something you do if you live somewhere where everyone rides a bike. But for the rest of us - for me anyway - it’s a bit of a novelty seeing someone else riding. Not as rare as seeing two-headed horses, but rare enough that I feel the need to acknowledge them with...
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*Before you start typing a comment in green ink, please check this post’s categorisation. Thank you* It’s funny how these things happen, isn’t it? Da Square Wheel Man over at the Bicycle Diaries wrote a post this week about bicycle helmets from a Tweedier age, and only last weekend, I’d photographed the same sort of...
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