What is this madness?

Welcome! You’ve stumbled across our blog all about our adventures on two wheels. Steph and I (Ben) are currently in the midst of planning a round-the-world cycle touring trip, which if you follow this blog you will no doubt hear all about. However, before deciding on our big mission we have always been keen (read; addicted) mountain bikers, so you will also likely hear about any cool MTB adventures we have along the way.

So this cycle touring lark is a bit new for us, it’s been a learning curve in regards to kit and bike to use, and we’ve had to dramatically change our expectations of every adventure ride we do. Coming from a mountain bike background where rides consisted of grinding up any climb to find the most fun descents, on our adventure bikes we tend to take things a little more leisurely and appreciate the scenery and the ride itself more than any gnarly downhills. However our MTB background has definitely influenced the decisions we made regarding which bike to use to cycle around the world on, as you’ll see in an upcoming blog post about the bike builds.

We’re essentially planning on living in a tent for at least a couple of years, so we must be hardened campers and outdoor enthusiasts, right? Well, not really. We both have a love for the outdoors, but predominantly that has been on two wheels and rock/root infested trails. Camping-wise we have both done some, but not a lot. And in recent years the majority of our “camping” trips have involved sleeping in the back of our van next to our mountain bikes (normally covered in mud etc.). Until shortly after we decided to cycle around the world we didn’t actually own a tent…

As a result the last few months have involved copious amounts of online research and getting advice from people we know that do/have done similar things. (Working in the bike industry we know more of these types of people than you might think.) It’s been an excellent excuse to buy a fair bit of new kit and we have been out on several missions to start field testing everything we have bought so far, details will be in our upcoming blog posts, so stay tuned!

This website/blog is also a new venture for us, but we are aware that we won’t be seeing family and friends for a rather prolonged period of time and this seemed like a good way to keep everyone informed all at once. We are currently playing catch up with it though, as we have had the bikes and kit somewhere near sorted for a couple of months and our first excursion was at the end of February. The delay in getting content out there is partially due to us both being fairly particular when it comes to look and feel for our website. I think we’ve got it reasonably good now, hopefully you’ll agree (send us a message if you have any suggestions, we’d love to hear from you).

More content will be added shortly, and going forward we plan on keeping it all up to date as our big unscripted ride progresses.

Watch this space.

Steph and Ben