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Community => Non-Thorn Related => Topic started by: Andre Jute on July 03, 2025, 01:29:56 AM

Title: Bucket List Rides
Post by: Andre Jute on July 03, 2025, 01:29:56 AM: A "bucket list" is an American and Canadian usage for a Wishlist of Things to Do. Share your own bucket list.
Here's one from my bucket. It's a nighttime ride designed by an artist.
(https://nocheckedbags.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/nocheckedbags.com_.png)
Click on the link for more.
https://nocheckedbags.com/2015/10/van-gogh-roosegaarde-starry-night-bicycle-path-in-the-netherlands/ (https://nocheckedbags.com/2015/10/van-gogh-roosegaarde-starry-night-bicycle-path-in-the-netherlands/)
Title: Re: Bucket List Rides
Post by: RonS on July 03, 2025, 02:33:42 AM: What a great idea for a thread, Andre! Let's hope this one will become as long lasting as "Rides of ..... Add yours here" And it'll give us lots of ideas!

I'll add two from my bucket. Hopefully I'll get them both in in 2026:

Start in Inverness, then make my way to Amsterdam via the Caledonian way, C2C, and the Way of the Roses, then use UK Rail and Eurostar to Brussels. The Van Gogh bike path will definitely be included in the route!

Starting in Seoul (actually Incheon, where the airport serving Seoul is located), make my way across the Cross Country Cycle Route, a 630km bike path, to Busan, where there is a ferry to Fukuoka, Japan. I'll then point the bike toward Tokyo, and ride until the time runs out and I need to take a train to catch my flight home.

That's two from me. Who's next?
Title: Re: Bucket List Rides
Post by: in4 on July 03, 2025, 06:34:10 PM: That ride starting in Seoul sounds really interesting, particularly with the prospect of a ferry to Japan too. I’ll have to check this out! What time of year would be best?
Title: Re: Bucket List Rides
Post by: RonS on July 03, 2025, 10:55:03 PM: When to go…When to go…..The never ending question.

Spring and fall are generally regarded to be the best times of year to visit southern Japan and South Korea. Which one you pick, in my opinion, depends on how well you tolerate heat. I like taking my bike tours in either May or September, mainly to avoid the heat, as well as the tourists who have no choice but to travel when the children are out of school.

Using the historical weather data feature of timeanddate.com, I looked at the last three Aprils and the last three Septembers in both Seoul and Fukuoka. It looks like daytime, highs start being reliably in the teens or better by the middle of April, and overnights are generally around 10 although it appears the odd night can get quite cool, as in low single digits. Last year, during my trip to Kyushu, which lasted from 10 April to 10 May, it was consistently in the low to mid 20s and overnight in the mid teens. That's right in my sweet spot.

Once the summer heat arrives, however, it arrives with a vengeance, and really hangs in. Expect highs of 30 or above, with high humidity thrown in for good measure, until probably mid to late October. In 2023, during the latter part of my first Japan tour, I was in southern Japan from 16 September until 6 October. I do not think there were more than one or two days where the temperature was below 30 and nighttime lows didn’t drop much below 25. Throw in 70 to 80% humidity, and there were a lot of nights when I just laid in the tent sweating.

If you'd like to see more info about cycling in Korea, there's a YouTube channel called. “lost then found”. It's a young Canadian Korean couple and they've made a series of videos about all the bike paths in Korea. A real fountain of information, including their recommendation for the best time to visit.
Title: Re: Bucket List Rides
Post by: in4 on July 04, 2025, 08:10:18 AM: Found it here!

https://youtu.be/JjKp5DSvIEI?feature=shared

Many thanks
Title: Re: Bucket List Rides
Post by: John Saxby on July 08, 2025, 02:28:05 AM: Andre, thanks for opening this thread.

Not wholly sure that what follows is a bucket list, but I do have a couple of rides that were in different stages of planning, and which I've had to put on the shelf:

1) In the winter of 2019/20, I mapped out a ride in Atlantic Canada in some detail: I'd take the train from Ottawa to Montréal, and from there to Bathurst, New Brunswick. From Bathurst, I'd follow the Acadian shore of the Gulf of St Lawrence south and east from New Brunswick to Nova Scotia and the causeway between the mainland and Cape Breton; ride around Cape Breton clockwise to the old French fortress of Louisbourg, 'cos I've always been intrigued by Follies, and if you're going to visit a Folly, then the one named after Louis Quatorze must surely be near the top of any list. The plan was to return to the mainland via Baddeck, to nod to the memory of McCurdy and the Silver Dart, and then to head to Nova Scotia's north shore, possibly all the way to Halifax, or perhaps to turn inland to pick up the train back to Montréal and Ottawa.

I estimated about 1800 - 2000 kms by bike, depending on the final route, hence about 21-25 days in all, depending on hills and rest days.

But then, the Unseemly Bizness Known As COVID intervened, and I had to shelve that plan.

2) A few years earlier, while our daughter was living in Berlin, I did a three-week ride in Denmark and SE Sweden, the latter to Ystad in particular, to pay homage to the books and characters of of Henning Mankell. That in turn led me to think about a cycling tour through the Celtic fringe of Europe. I got as far as roughing out phases grosso modo: Begin in St-Malo, because of its historic links to Canada (or what would become Canada), and do a circuit if Brittany. From there, to Wessex, and thence to the Welsh coast to a suitable ferry to Ireland. There, I'd visit the Wicklow Hills S of Dublin, whence came my mother's people. And then, northwards to Northern Ireland and a ferry to Iona. Thence to the western coast of Scotland, and the islands.

Life Intervened, as Life does, and I never managed to take the second possibility to the level of a "plan".

Truth be told, I rather doubt either one of these rides will materialize. I now have family commitments which have a prior claim, especially in the form of four delightful granddaughters in Ontario and 'Straya. Still, if Marcia or one of our kids were to say, "John/Dad, why don't you take a three-week break from All This?" -- then I'd be off in a flash.

Cheers, John
Title: Re: Bucket List Rides
Post by: Andre Jute on July 08, 2025, 11:32:43 AM: RonS, whoever planned those fantastic Korean bike paths in those videos you linked, or allowed them to happen, surely should be in some Cycling Hall of Fame. Cycle tracks on that scale, except perhaps next to canals where there is already a towpath, is never going to happen in the West, unfortunately. Too many zoning czars.

John, I'm impressed by your knowledge of Canadian history after all those years in foreign parts, and your hidden pun on French Lewis, stonemason of Versailles, the folly of follies. That's one ambitious tour.

I'm probably one of only a handful of Celts in Ireland. Among my ancestors Hengish and Horsa were the Jutes who c440 led what later became known as the Anglo-Saxon conquest; it's BS by the descendants of much larger tribes: the Jutes came first and sent for rest of the Angles and the Saxon tribes to come share the riches and incidentally help them defend the Jutish kingdom of Kent. Horsa and Hengist were the grand-several-times-nephews of Odin, after whom the city of Odense (modernized version of "see", like a bishop's seat -- it means his hall -- current official Danes seem a bit embarrassed by Odin and have an alternative "sanctuary" explanation for the name) on Funen island off the coast of Denmark is named; this is the same Odin (c200) the warrior-singer that Anglo-Saxon Britain would worship as their god until the coming of Christianity. I can ride my bike across the river below the hill from my house and up the looooong hill opposite to look down on the bay Erik Bloodsword ("Red Erik the family commie" to us boys) sailed up to sack the abbey at Timoleague. Bloodsword was a Kentish prince sent into exile because, presumably, he was too violent and short-tempered even for those berserkers; he fed an abbot, who didn't clear the road fast enough when Erik's hunting dogs approached, to the dogs.

I did go to Kent to look into what was to be found of this history, but in the years between the invasion of the Jutes c440 and the invasion of the Normans (more, loosely, Vikings -- the Duchy of Normandy was the result of a Viking invasion; the Normans weren't genetically French to start with) in 1066, you can tell from the lack of the later precision in the first circa date that not a lot of thought was given to history, or even what time it was. (I'm not condemning them, you understand; as a boy and a young man I was impatient with all this pointless history, the despair of a great-uncle who was Professor of History at Stellenbosch, to whom I wish now I'd listened much more carefully.) In fact, according to a cousin who was a don at King's in Cambridge who specialized in the early period of the Jutish-Anglo-Saxon takeover -- and to be fair who warned me that I wouldn't find much in the way of physical evidence -- Bede, writing several hundred years later, is still our best guide. Also according to my cousin, a lot of what we now believe are Celts are in fact Picts (same as those in Scotland and much of England before the arrival of the J-A-S tribes) who arrived perhaps eight thousand years ago from what's now the Middle East.

Warning: All of this is the state of knowledge before 1980, when I was in Cambridge helping polish a report to the government and researching my planned novel on Keynes and the Bloomsburies, and a novel on Odin, neither of which happened (my publishers bribed me instead to write thick pseudonymous thrillers attractive to paperback buyers -- in effect, my paperback publisher financed my literary hardcover publishers). The revelations following the Human Genome project happened later, after I'd lost interest in the novel about Odin because all I had was enough for a short monograph which nobody would pay for.

There was a coda to this search. On his deathbed, my cousin received a request to contribute a "a more modern entry" about the Jutes to a venerable encyclopedia. He returned a note recommending me instead, and at his graveside I received a message that what I didn't know I should make up and quote him as my authority. So I took the encyclopedia's money (enough to buy five 150mph capable tyres for each of my three Citroen SM -- they were wonderful fast touring cars, but so unreliable that you needed three in order to have one ready to drive) and in an hour with some notes my cousin left me for my book, knocked up a piece for the encyclopedia. The starry-eyed editor (I'd just been declared "wild but wonderful" by the NY Times and lauded by The Times in London for my "highly moral environmental outlook" -- or something even more embarrassingly wrongheaded) shot my piece straight through for publication, and the next thing she knew she and her boss were carpeted by his boss, who told them, "You can't let a thriller writer tell the readers of my encyclopedia that 'Celts are Vikings with a song in their soul!'" When they called me in, under the delusion that they would carpet me as well, I said, "Well, who TF is better qualified than me to tell you about Celts?"

Here in Ireland there are stone circles, some of ancient provenance, some modern fakes (the one on the parallel road to Kilmacsimon Quay from Innishannon is a modern garden ornament, definitely not built by Druid priests). You can see ancient small and large stone circles almost everywhere in Ireland; I once saw one down a lane between buildings, with a fence around it because it was a listed monument on a publican's land, which he wanted to "reclaim" to expand his parking lot. Another real one we, showing visitors around about forty years ago, found in farmer's field on a back road also had a flat stone large enough to take a human sacrifice. History is grisly. The photo is a reconstructive watercolor painting of it at the summer solstice.
Title: Re: Bucket List Rides
Post by: John Saxby on July 09, 2025, 01:28:10 AM: Thank you, Andre. I really should work out a way to get to the Holy Ground to meander (if one can do so on two wheels) among standing stones & tall tales. ;)

I thought--for obvious reasons--that your ancestors might well be Jutes. FWIW, my dad's family lore is that his forebears settled in what is now Sussex sometime in the 9th or 10th century. They were (we were told) Jutes from the borderlands of modern Germany and Denmark, the Schleswig-Holstein region. In the event, they were on the defensive side of the Historic Unpleasantness wrongly known as the Battle of Hastings. William landed his army at Hastings, one of just two places on the south coast where you could do such a thing, and the battle itself took place inland, at Senlac Hill. This is now the village of Battle, for centuries the family seat. My dad's forebears were yeoman farmers, and as was the custom, one or more of the sons in each generation were soldiers whenever called upon.

Now and then I bump into someone with the surname "Saxby", and an enjoyable conversation ensues. A couple of times, we've found that we're distant relatives. I don't know the origin of the name, but in 2012 I found a plausible source: On a ride from Amsterdam to Vienna, I visited museums in Cologne. One had a well-preserved Teutonic short sword from the 6th century. (The Teutonic tribes, as you know were fierce adversaries and admirers of the Romans.) The sword was called a "saxe", so I reckon that my dad's people were either makers or users of the saxe, or both.

And, on Other Interesting Things That Happened in the far mists of time, let me suggest you read Farley Mowat's The FarFarers. As you may know, he wrote WestViking, about Norse seafarers in Newfoundland. The Farfarers is his account of the arrival in what is now Newfoundland and Labrador (some centuries before the Vikings) of a people he calls the Albans, from the Orkneys. It explores anomalies and open questions from his earlier research; and in building his story, helps the reader by italicising his various explanatory suppositions about the Albans.

Cheers, John
Title: Re: Bucket List Rides
Post by: Andre Jute on July 09, 2025, 05:33:59 AM: Quote from: John Saxby on July 09, 2025, 01:28:10 AM
I really should work out a way to get to the Holy Ground to meander (if one can do so on two wheels) among standing stones & tall tales. ;)

The main roads here are heavily populated by fast traffic, dangerous for cyclists. But if you want to spend the time, you can plot a course on the lesser roads and jumped-up farm roads, "meandering" along from standing standing stones to standing stones, with Tara, the Druid's master clock like the atomic clock is the reference today, as the high point. The standing stones are all marked on the local scale Survey Maps, complete with their own symbol, though it'll cost you a bit in maps and weight and space; you could look at putting them on your phone. Or whatever you like as a focus; for instance we spent several days in the Burren, an area of alien mien and behavior, something like that area in the Namib Desert which blooms overnight for a week every year from horizon to horizon, and then overnight is just blank sand again as the tiny succulents feeding on the dew that blows in from the Agulhas Stream nearby fold themselves into the sand for another year; my mother, who otherwise hated camping, would camp in that forbidding desert for three weeks to be certain of catching few days of beauty. Many cyclists speak enthusiastically about the Wild Atlantic Way, which in return for some discomfort from the wind off the ever-present Atlantic, or a lot if you chose your time wrong, is a very beautiful ride, even if not as informative for the curious cyclist.

Note that there's a series of hillwalkers' paths all over the country, theoretically permitting walkers to circumambulate the island, and many of them are passable on a bike, though some stretches might be hard work, and at others you need local knowledge to stay clear, find another way (I have in mind one where the Lee River -- the mighty river that divides into two around the central island of Cork, just Manhattan without its Central Park -- is shown but it's actually a fingerling stream you can step over, but just of out sight from there, the path ends at a cliff, which is dangerous enough to descend, never mind carry a bike down, and anyway, the rock face ends directly into a pretty large lake, which froze us as we swam across, and ruined our food and my dry shirt in one of the ladies' backpacks -- we discovered later that before the path to the origin of the "mighty River Lee" we should have walked along a tarmac lane for about twenty paces, and taken another, later version of the path which would have taken us around the downslope of the cliff and around the forbidding lake below). When he passed away, my chum Philip and I were planning a ride on one of these paths that has been tarmacced for about 40 miles near Rosslare, which is also the port at which the ferries from Pembroke, Fishguard, Roscoff, Cherbourg and Bilboa dock. There are also ferries directly to Cork (not very well served, perhaps because the crossing is inevitably a bit rougher than the others), Dublin and Belfast from the Continent and from the UK.

One day I came out of the library and found another cyclist waiting by my bike. Out of the airport his carbon seat post had broken off and stabbed him in a tender place. I took him home with me and after inspecting his wound, took him straight down to the surgery, over which in those days I lived, to be stitched up. He was a Scottish doctor retired young, very fit indeed. Because of the cheap air tickets he bought, he was taking only two days to ride first south from Cork Airport and around the Ring of Kerry and from there straight up to Belfast to make his return plane. Crazy doesn't begin to describe it; it's very likely on the stupid side of two hundred stressful miles a day, not worth even plotting on a map for any cyclist with his mind in gear; you'll miss everything good along the way, and to make his plane he'd have to go on main roads up the spine of the country. He had literally no luggage except his toothbrush and his credit card, and a rain jacket so light it rolled up into a tiny tool case. He'd stayed in Irish guest houses before and knew he could count on the landladies to wash and dry his gear. He wrote to me later that he made his plane with time to spare.

That's perhaps the sort of tour you want to make in featureless place, but that doesn't describe Ireland (except on the main drags, where ulcers are born), where the small details -- and graces -- matter. Gee, mom, I missed riding through the Gap of Dunloe (if you go there, remind me to tell you the tragic story of those small squares marked out by stones exactly as I once told it to an Israeli Cabinet Minister who was an old economics teacher of mine, returning his many favors), kissing the Blarney Stone, and Bunratty Castle, and Yeats' Tower, and the Cliffs of Moher, etc, etc. When seen your fill of standing stones, all of these and much more are accessible without over-reliance on main roads, but only for relaxed and unhurried cyclists. I think nothing of making a four-day tour that takes me no further than about 60m from home as the crow flies and maybe two or three times that in total miles out and back, leaving plenty of time to visit features the landladies identify for me, and stopping to draw or paint what takes my fancy.

Note that if a main road is unavoidable and you don't like the looks of it, that the country buses will let you put your bike in the luggage compartment. This is at the driver's discretion, and if there's space in the luggage compartment, but my bike has never been refused, though I take care not to demand the service on Friday afternoons or Monday mornings in the same direction as the multitudinous students are traveling. There's also supposed to be a fixed fee for the bike, same whatever the distance, but, again, I've never been charged. There are also mainline trains between the major cities on which you're supposed to put your hefty luggage in the luggage van, presumably including your bike, but I don't use them as they just drop you inconveniently in the middle of another city. But Cork Train Station is the exception, a three minute ride from the Cork Bus Station, where you can take bus to the other side of the city, beyond the high-speed bypasses with their inconvenient and dangerous roundabouts (there are no pedestrian crossings), and then start pedaling east- or southwards. Both the train and the bus stations are the same three minutes from the famous hostel behind Isaac's Restaurant, or you can turn the other way from the station and start traveling north- or westwards without the hassle of crossing the city centre, and be in the countryside in ten minutes. Well, you might first have pedal or push over a hill that the professional cyclists on the Tour of Ireland purely hated.

***
About your surname, John, I'm no expert on Old or Middle English, or Alte Deutch, but there are other possibilities, of which armourer suggests itself to me. All those languages, from their earliest incarnation, were portmanteau formers (something English, itself a Teutonic language, has largely lost), so I imagine that you will need to find at least two and possibly more contemporary words, with elisions at the joint(s), to be reasonably certain of the derivation at the time your family name arose. But the first time I heard your name, I thought Axe Wielder, that tall guy right next to the Pike Man. BTW, your actual Teutons, the ones who won the psychological war by winning Augustus' Eagles (the standards of the two defeated legions), only later copied that short stabbing sword from the Romans; their weapons in the time of Augustus were short-handled axes and short stabbing spears, much like the Zulu stabbing spear, very suitable for close-coupled forest fighting where the Roman spiked shield and sword were an awkward encumbrance in the underbrush of unmanaged forests.

***
Thanks for the reference to those books; I'm off to order them. FarFarers is a typical portmanteau word!