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Author: Ben Powles

Get Bike. Build Bike. Ride.

Get Bike. Build Bike. Ride.
by Ben Powles on 22/05/2017 with 1 Comment

Get Bike. Build Bike. Ride. Is it that really easy? Or more accurately, “Get a massive pile of parts. Spend quite a few hours assembling said parts. Too knackered to ride”. And that doesn’t include the weeks of research into … Read More

Blog, Europe, Kit, UK Bike Build, bikepacking, Genesis, Surly, Wheel Building
What is this madness?

What is this madness?
by Ben Powles on 15/05/2017 with 3 Comments

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 … Read More

Blog, Europe, UK Bike Build, Kit, Yorkshire
Categories
  • Blog
  • Europe
    • Poland
    • Slovakia
    • Spain
    • UK
  • Kit
  • North America
    • Canada
    • USA
  • South America
    • Argentina
    • Bolivia
    • Brazil
    • Chile
    • Colombia
    • Ecuador
    • Paraguay
    • Peru
    • Uruguay
Recent Posts
  • The church at Ermita de San Frutos One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Portsmouth, UK to Madrid, Spain. 12/04/2020
  • Europe 2020: New Bikes and New Adventures. 29/02/2020
  • No Rocks! Only snow! – Krakow and Zdiar 16/02/2020
  • Waterfront Trail and the Return Home: Toronto to England 23/09/2019
  • O, Canada! Montreal, QC to Newcastle, ON. 🇨🇦 16/08/2019

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Happy #worldbicycleday 🚲
What we love most abou
Happy #worldbicycleday 🚲 What we love most about travelling by bike is the freedom and independence you have. Being in the mountains days away from people is great and here in the central Peruvian highlands we were practising social distancing way before it was a thing!

More local riding and exploration, this time on th
More local riding and exploration, this time on the skinnier tyres so sticking to the backroads rather than forest trails. Luckily we’ve got quite a lot of quiet country lanes to cycle and Ben’s been slowly mapping, then riding, many of them. This was also quite a novelty ✈️ We’ve seen some of the clearest skies recently so this really looked out of place ✈️

With all of the baking photos we’ve been posting
With all of the baking photos we’ve been posting lately you’d think that we’d been in the kitchen 24/7 but we’ve still managed to make time for some daily exercise. 🚵🏻‍♀️🚵🏻‍♂️ It’s not quite the same as travelling by bike on a different continent but there’s something nice about being able to explore the local area from your doorstep. 🚵🏻‍♂️🚵🏻‍♀️ Sometimes you even find hidden gems like this and get to explore trails you never knew existed. 🌲 🌲 🌲 One thing we’ll never get sick of though is the smell of a pine forest - it’s probably our favourite place to ride and the sweet smell of fresh pine is an added bonus!🌲 🌲 🌲

An active sourdough starter needs to be fed regula
An active sourdough starter needs to be fed regularly which means adding more flour and water to the jar. Part of this feeding process involves removing some of the starter before you feed it again, otherwise you’d end up with more starter than you can realistically use. You’d also need to feed it much more to keep it active and healthy. 🧁🧇🍕 So... What do you do with the discard if you aren’t baking a loaf? After all, there’s only so much bread you can eat and you don’t want to waste all that flour you’ve been feeding your starter. Not when it’s such a precious commodity these days. 🧁🧇🍕 Well we’ve been pretty creative with our discard, trying out lots of different recipes and expanding our baking horizons by making lots of food with sourdough discard. Things that normally we wouldn’t make such as crumpets, waffles and Chelsea buns or adding sourdough to things we would usually make like pizza, Yorkshire puddings (which we found are called popovers in the US... funny huh!) and banana bread. ➡️Swipe ➡️ through the photos to see our creations ➡️ What do you think? 🧁🧇🍕Turns out you can make pretty much anything with a bit of sourdough starter and whilst some things taste a bit fruity, others you can’t tell any difference. It just depends on the recipe. 🧁🧇🍕Now to do some exercise after eating so much delicious food! 🚵🏻‍♀️🚵🏻‍♂️

🥖 Here’s a selection of our very first sourdo
🥖 Here’s a selection of our very first sourdough loaves, all made possible with the help of the lovely Douglas we introduced you to yesterday. What do you think? 🥖 We’ve been lucky to have found white and wholemeal flour in on of our small local shops. It’s been nice to be able to #supportlocalbusinesses during this time rather than relying on the big supermarkets and apart from yeast, we’ve found you can get everything else you need there. But now we’ve got a starter to naturally leaven our bread, who needs yeast! 🥖 With this white and wholemeal mix our loaves have been tasty additions to meal times. 🥖 Quinoa, oats, sunflower seeds, polenta and linseeds make our seeded loaves even heartier. 🥖 Now we’ve got the bread recipe dialled I think we need to experiment with new scoring techniques now too...

We’d like to introduce you to the newest member
We’d like to introduce you to the newest member of the Unscripted Ride team... Douglas the sourdough starter! 🥖 He’s pretty easy going but with a bubbly personality. He isn’t fussy when it comes to feeding (he’ll eat white or wholemeal flour, basically whatever’s going) and likes being warm. He’s created almost half a dozen excellent loaves so far and a variety of baked goods, both savoury and sweet. Most recently it’s been crumpets and Chelsea buns. We’ll show you them 🔜 🥖 Baking with a sourdough starter would probably be more difficult for us in the old ‘normal’ times because of how long it takes. But now if a recipe calls for anything under about 18 hours worth of prep, it’s a quick bake! 🥖 Making, maintaining and baking with a sourdough starter has been on our to do list for a long time but like a lot of things, we never got around to actually doing it. 🥖 We’re trying to make the most of our time during the lockdown, focussing on the things we can do and staying positive. Has anyone else started something new and found a new interest during this time #stayinghome #quedateencasa?

Have you discovered a new hobby or been learning a
Have you discovered a new hobby or been learning a new skill during the lockdown? 🚲🧘🏻🏃‍♀️🏋🏻‍♂️✍️📖🌱 We’ve been keeping ourselves busy. So far #stayingathome hasn’t been a chore or got boring. Our daily ‘to do’ lists keep us busy, even if it’s simply taking the dogs for a walk and 20 minutes of yoga, we’re finding enough to fill our days. Over the next week or two we will share what we’ve been up to lately, starting with our newest interest and hobby: sourdough. 🥖 Our interest in sourdough began when we first volunteered with @workawayinfo back in December 2017. The workaway was an eye-opening, rewarding and sometimes challenging experience in off-grid and self-sufficient living in Chilean Patagonia. We had no electricity, hot water or internet so everything ran on fire power, which is why Ben’s biggest job was collecting and chopping firewood. 🥖 Which leads us to the sourdough. Once a week they would bake enough bread for the next in their outdoor bread oven, fire powered of course, and we would also receive a loaf or two. The hearty loaf was a meal in itself, packed with the tangy sourdough starter along with quinoa, oats, polenta and seeds. It was delicious and always the highlight of the week! 🥖 So that is why we have created our own sourdough starter. We’ll introduce you to him next time. 📷 Photo is a throwback to 2017 and our Patagonia cabin. That was a great month!

🌍 Happy Earth Day 🌎
Over the last few weeks
🌍 Happy Earth Day 🌎 Over the last few weeks we’ve been appreciating the beauty of the Herefordshire countryside. If there’s an upside to returning to the UK it’s that it has given us the opportunity to adventure closer to home and explore the backroads we didn’t know existed. 🌏 With all unnecessary travel halted, we can’t drive to our usual mtb trails so we’ve ridden from the door and even found some fun off road riding. It’s not the Andes or the Iberian peninsula but it’s nice to get some fresh air and stretch the legs in the middle of nowhere without seeing another person. Being rewarded with views like this help too. 🌍 It helps that the weather has been perfect for weeks now and what makes it even better is that there aren’t many cars on the road, only the odd lorry and tractor to watch out for. 🌎#earthdayeveryday #ridelocal #adventuresclosetohome

As promised… [New Blog Post] – One Step Forward,
As promised... [New Blog Post] - One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Portsmouth, UK to Madrid, Spain. ⛴ 🇪🇸 🚵🏻‍♀️🚵🏻‍♂️⛰🏕✈️🇬🇧 We once heard adventure described as, “a romantic name for suffering” and while we really enjoyed our two week bikepacking trip through northern Spain it often felt like the odds were stacked against us and it might have been easier just to stay at home! Want to know more? 🤔Follow the link in bio (our website - unscriptedride.com) to read more.


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