Lessons Learned on a Pair of £50 Bikes (Video) (2024)

It’s a sunny evening in May 2024, and we’re loading a removal van to leave our home in the Lake District, England. Swifts soar around the cottage, and a glowing sun wishes us a fond farewell. We’ve been living here just two years but have fallen in love with this beautiful part of the world. And still, we can’t wipe this smile from our faces. My partner Sarah and I are about to begin our dream of cycling around the world.

We quit jobs, give away possessions, and sell our beloved adventure bikes in preparation for an eagerly awaited upgrade. Life blurs, hurtling towards our June leaving date. The passports arrive, the packing lists are finalised, and the goodbyes are said. We just have the last pieces of the puzzle to fall into place before we can begin riding east towards India. And then life throws a curveball. Things are out of our hands, and the trip is on hold for the third time.

Sarah and I have fantasised about a world ride since we met 13 years ago. Attempt number one, we cycled 1,000 miles across Europe just before the pandemic began, and attempt number two was halted by medical issues the month before leaving. And it’s all just made us more determined to finally hit the road. There are no alternatives or wavering feelings, but we have started to feel rushed. Now in our 30s, it feels like our opportunity to experience the world with blissful youthhood naivety is slipping away.

We sit and restlessly twiddle our thumbs. Days turn into weeks, and weeks turn into months, with this unbearable feeling of pent-up anticipation inside that doesn’t know where to go. The summer is flying by, and it slowly dawns on us that we might need to be more open-minded. Neither of us can drive, and so sitting outside are two rickety old town bikes we use to get around on. They’re deliberately rundown to slip under the radar of local thieves, but they run. This wasn’t our dream adventure, but perhaps these rickety old bicycles could keep us going until then.

I’m riding a 1997 Giant Team World Cup with a steel frame, 26″ wheels, and five working gears, costing the grand sum of £45. Sarah is riding a Giant CRS with 6000 aluminium Allux tubing, fashioned with a trusty 3×8 Shimano Acera groupset and a Memory Foam saddle. It cost £50. Both run ultra-slick tyres with the stopping power of a child’s tricycle. They’re suited to urban ambles but yet to be tested on tour. In our haste to get away, we spent an hour doing some slight repairs and then loaded a ramshackle packing list into a suitably old-school setup. Because fancy bikepacking bags just wouldn’t have felt right.

On The Road

The opening leg of our journey is a blissful blur. There is such hunger to cycle and explore, our spirited legs carrying us along a thickety track like smooth tarmac. These are no longer £50 bikes beneath our feet; they are trusty adventure steads ready for the furthest corners of the globe. To start, we’ll follow an estuary to the Suffolk coastline and see how far north we can go. Then, who knows!? Everything swirls by in a whirl of sensations and emotions. Excitement and awe, the scent of salty sea air, and the sound of seagulls, suntan lotion dripping from brows as the coastal sunshine beats down.

The bikes bounce from the off-road track onto a coastal road, careering past families happily crabbing in the sunshine as we avoid the temptation to stop and wander through the colourful beach huts and fishmonger kiosks. We reach a small fishing village in a daze, waiting for a boat to take us across the estuary whilst my haywire excitement shoots everywhere. I want to swim, want to move, want to keep going, with a restless attention span that would humble a goldfish.

A small boat pulls up to the jetty, and a blunt but humorous captain welcomes us onboard with our bikes. We set sail, and euphoria washes over me. It’s been a difficult summer, and try as we might to stay positive, all the trip setbacks have been hard. But now, with waves lapping at the boat side and sea air filling my lungs, I feel we’ve finally moved on to the next chapter. A long, deep breath in. I grin at Sarah, thinking of all the possibilities around us. She grins back. “The older the bikes, the easier to fix,” the captain calls as we step out of the boat. We smile over our shoulders as we course down the coastal road and onto a bumpy track, flying north. Then I hear a worrying yell from behind.

“What’s happened?” I shout

“Come and look.”

“WHAT’S HAPPENED!?”

“Just come and look…”

The reality is, these are £50 bikes, and they don’t share our enthusiasm for off-road riding. They have been creaking and swaying, bearings crunching, and tyres flexing for the whole journey. We’ve just ignored it. Sarah’s flimsy rear rack is now aggressively buckled into the cassette. The sweet soundtrack in my head stops silent. I bend the weakened metal away from the cassette with relative ease, but if the rack couldn’t take the load before, it certainly can’t now. We’re in a rural area miles from any kind of bike shop, and it’s a Saturday evening. If there are any village bike shops, they aren’t likely to be open the following day. Our best option is to find a local campsite and order a replacement rack with speedy delivery, which we do.

Deflated

“Okay, if we take this route, we can probably make up lost time along the coastline,” I tell Sarah over a quick breakfast.

With the replacement rack fitted, we set back off, tramping our way through myriad farmers’ fields. We’re still not sure where we’re going, but we’re going with certainty, skirting around tractors as they crunch along banks of roads, spilling sandy soil across the tarmac. Just 10 miles from the campground, I take a last-second turn left and hear a horrible combination of noises behind me, ending with a crunch and a wheeze. Sarah is crumpled on the floor, tangled in the bike, with a car skidding to a halt on the sandy tarmac behind her, eyes welling, little pebbles crushed into her arms and legs. The slick tyres had not agreed with the quick turn on sandy tarmac, and this was their sign.

Sun beats down, and the cooling breeze has gone. Sarah gives a brave smile but I know she’s shaken up, confidence understandably rattled by this series of events. I feel crushed knowing my unnecessary rushing had put her in danger. And with tales between our legs, we retreat to a coppice woodland to camp. It’s old and dry. The canopy creaks and sways, much like the bikes, and the floor is littered with dead trees. I remove a dead badger from the flattest patch of ground, and we set up for the night, feeling deflated. I look at a map and realise how close we are to the harbour which was due to take us across to Europe. This long-awaited trip is not going to plan. Night falls, the day comes to an end, and we consider whether this trip should too.

Acceptance

It’s 5 a.m. The early morning sun sends golden rays piercing through the woodland, setting the landscape alive with colour and hope. Smiling over our morning coffee, we agree a different approach is needed for the trip and the bikes.

Instead of setting ambitious sights on Scotland, we’d focus on reaching the next harbour town safely, and we’d take things from there. My breaks and gears continue to lurch, and Sarah’s replacement rack is still worryingly flimsy, but the bikes plod along, squeaking and rattling. Slowly, we pull into the harbour, with a 10-mile journey feeling like we’d completed a divide. It’s still morning, and an elderly couple opens their cooler to share a beer and an ice cream, laughing passionately about something. Seaweed laps rhythmically on the shorefront as terns chatter overhead. We become entrenched in a conversation with an eccentric local about the origins of the Suffolk flag.

It amazes us how a slight change of pace can make such a big difference. We spot a herd of well-camouflaged deer from the saddle and spy a kestrel hovering over thickets in search of field mice. Our planned coastal route streaks ahead, but a sign towards a nature reserve points to the left, and we take it. Berms sweep through dense woodland, and trails carve into remote landscapes. The smiles widen across our faces now that we’ve stopped fighting against the bikes and accepted their flaws and beauties. Gradually, the canopy eventually opens to vibrant fields of magenta and gold. We learn these heathland ecosystems are rarer than rainforests, but only because we slowed down, took a detour, and read the sign.

Days pass by, no longer distracted by distant lands, delayed plans, or time constraints. Swims are once again something to be cherished rather than rushed. We plunge, grubby and smelly into salty water, watching the sunset glimmer on the horizon without a care in the world.

We first got hooked on bicycle travelling because of its ability to show you the in-between. The world constantly presents itself, and it’s up to you how much you take it. For me, it’s those unmarked places, those chance encounters and experiences that are unforgettable. I sometimes find myself getting transfixed on speed, mileage, and end-of-day destinations, but experiences like this remind me that the more that happens, the more those intricacies slip away.

We continue cycling and receive some exciting news. Soon, we can pick up the new bikes. One of the last pieces of the puzzle before the grand voyage. And so we decide to find one last camping spot on the beach. The sun pulls down purple hues across the ocean, with flocks of birds flying across the panorama. Soft waves creep up from high tide, and we push our bikes through the sand on a deserted beach. We cook dinner slowly, looking at Sarah’s bruised leg and chuckling as the stars start to glimmer above us.

These seven days on the coastline had made me realise just how much happiness I’d placed on this grand journey. Life has been on hold for years, never fully present, just waiting. But when you place so much focus on a specific point in the future, once you reach it, it’s very hard not to just become fixated on the next. And in the fast-paced world we live in, that’s something I’d like to avoid. All the pieces of the puzzle will eventually fall into place and this fabled grand journey will begin. I’m not going to pretend it will be on £50 bikes, but they taught us a hell of a lot. They’d shaped the road ahead, and until that trip starts, we’ll be smiling and enjoying each moment and each place, slowly.

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