Yesterday I posted a bit of a summary about the 7 day bike trip I did last week from Riga to Tallinn, in Latvia/Estonia. Sam also posted my updates from every day on the trip as I did it. Today I wanted to just capture a few practical aspects of doing a self-guided, pre-planned trip on your own, based on my experiences and the way I personally like to travel.

1. Decide if you want to bring your bike or rent one. I don’t have the perfect bike for touring, so I have always rented. This takes care of the “what to do with the bike after you’re done riding” question, but also means you’re on a bit of an unknown quantity. I alleviate some of that by bringing my own seat, pedal and helmet.

2. Decide if you are willing to camp or not. Camping gives you more options for sleeping, but of course is its own logistical ball of worms. I’ve done it, but not alone. If you aren’t going to camp, consider booking accommodations in advance, especially in rural or busy areas. I had the company I rented the bike from book my accommodation, and I was very glad of it — there were at least two nights I wouldn’t have had a place to stay, otherwise. And even in places where there are more options, I personally don’t love arriving in a place at 3 or 4 in the afternoon and beginning the search for a place to sleep.

3. Get comfortable with basic bike mechanics. I am not great at bike repair, and that’s been one of the biggest reasons I have limited my cycle touring in the past. I did a fantastic one day hands on tutorial back in April, and I felt so much more relaxed because of it. I also brought my own tools. I didn’t end up having to use any of my knowledge except to slightly adjust my gear cable but I felt much better knowing I COULD if I had to. (I also did a wilderness first aid course, and ended up helping a woman in the airport who fell and hurt herself as I left). So yeah, prepared!

4. Test your panniers out at home. I bought new MEC 20L Aquanot panniers for this trip because I’d had trouble with the mounting hooks the last time I’d used my older ones for a longer trip. The mounts on these were super easy, and worked well. I chose these because they were also waterproof, but they didn’t squish down quite as much as I wanted them to. I would probably look for slightly smaller panniers next time to reduce the possibility of carrying too much. Which brings me to…

5. Seriously think through what you want to carry with you. I had more than I really wanted, especially shoes, because I had another week in Tallinn and St. Petersburg at the end of the trip. I also had a super heavy lock they gave me with the bike, and wished I’d brought my own lighter lock instead especially since I was in rural areas and almost every hotel had a place to leave my bike inside. I was too compliant to refuse this one when I got the bike, but wish I had — I also lost the only key, so it was a useless piece of heavy hardware in the end. I also chose to travel without any camera except my phone for the first time in 10 years, and it was freeing.

6. Assume it will be cold, and be pleasantly surprised. For someone who travels a lot, I have a weird inability to predict what clothes I’ll want when I’m packing. Layers are my friend. I start with cycling jerseys and shorts and work around that. This time I also had a tank jersey with a built in bra, a winter running shirt, a cycling waterproof coat, a wind jacket and a quilted vest. I wore every layer but the tank at various points. I also had a pair of soft pyjama-like yoga pants and my trusty keens sandals for off the bike and these have become my new traveling uniform.

7. Have access to data. I use the “roam like home” feature on my phone that gives me access to my home data plan while I’m in Europe or Asia for $10/day. This is invaluable to me for staying connected to people when I’m traveling alone and more important, for google maps. Which I needed almost every day at least once, especially to find hotels in cities.

8 Be willing to get a little lost. The bike tour company gave me really good, clear trip notes, along with good maps. There are cycling routes (though not designated cycling trails) all across the Baltics, and they are reasonably well signed. But landmarks and roads and construction change, and pretty much every day I ended up using a combination of the trip notes, paper maps and google maps to find my way. It was particularly important for me to let go of the idea that the mileage number on my bike computer should be completely aligned with the trip notes, because there were variances. I had to let go of feeling like I was following the instructions “step by step” and learn to look around, figure out directions, and get a sense of where I was. (This was hardest in the towns!)

9. Let go of pre-conceived notions of speed. When I’m on my road bike, I average about 25 km/hour, more on a good day. A lot of the time with the weighted cross bike in a headwind, I was looking at something like 13 to 15 km/hour. This can play head games with me and I feel like I’m falling behind or push myself too hard. I needed the computer to be able to roughly match up distance with maps, but I stopped paying attention to anything but indicators of how far I was in my day’s journey.

10. Clipping in helps. I’ve documented many times before how I’ve stupidly tried to use my road bike cleats on tours (spoiler alert: they don’t work for rough terrain when you need to be able to pedal unclipped sometimes), and I finally invested in a not-pricey pair of mountain biking shoes with spd clips. I have two sets of spd pedals that flip to flat sides, and I tested out both before I left. I had some anxiety about clipping in with a loaded bike, and I find spds harder to scoot in and out of than my cleats, but they worked great. On the third day, I lost a screw out of one of the spds, and happened to be in one of the only towns where I could replace them. I liked the new ones so much better that I replaced the other one as well. I was very grateful for the way the weight transfers with clipped in shoes, especially in the wind.

Finally — and I can’t stress this enough — cheese sandwiches are your friend. Most of the places I was cycling, there was literally no place for lunch and rarely a food store. Most breakfasts were continental style, so I got in the habit of making a cheese sandwich on the EXCELLENT (I cannot stress enough how excellent) Baltic bread every day, and eating this at about the 30 km point in my ride, with dried apricots I’d brought from home. The food on my trip was fantastic, but lunch was not reliably available. I also brought some powerbar type snack thingies but something that felt like a real “lunch” was an important motivator for me.

So that’s my survival guide… what things do you find most helpful when cycle touring?

I just rode my bike from Riga (the truly lovely capital of Latvia) to Tallinn (the equally enchanting capital of Estonia). You can read about my actual journey last week (three links here, here and here) for all the emotional and experiential aspects of riding more than 500 km across the Baltics. It was a fantastic trip for me, challenging but just the right amount.

Following my trip, Catherine posted about how mine inspired her to do some touring of her own. Kim has also just finished riding her bike up and down many hills in Yorkshire and other parts of England. Sam, Sarah, Catherine and Joh are about to embark on the Friends for Life Bike Rally again. Jean and others have posted in the comments about their experiences cycle touring. These different conversations made me think about all of the different ways to ride bikes far, and why we do it.

There are dozens of different ways to do cycle touring, and different approaches fit different people, different climates and different countries. Over time, I’ve figured out that a hybrid of guided and hardcore improv is right for me.

I’m not the truly hardcore person who gets on bike in, say, Bangkok, with a tent, no plan and a couple of maps and rides for weeks. I’ve met those people — I admire those people — but I’m not one of them. But the more cycling I’ve done, the less inclined I am to also do a fully supported trip. I’ve done those in Vietnam, Laos and Sri Lanka, and had wonderful experiences — but these trips tend to have a bit more of a cultural aspect to them than I strictly want. That means, for example, there will be a visit to an historic site that means a 3 hour bus ride and little time on the bike that day, or they really want you to experience cities A and B so they build in a 2 hour bus transfer. Or suddenly you’ll find yourself in a cricket farm with a plateful of crickets and shots of rice wine. At 10 am. Not the mid-morning snack I want. On those trips, I also had a bit of an experience where the riders liked riding more than the guides did, which meant we were sometimes arguing for more time on the bike — which was odd for a cycling trip.

For me, guided trips are great for countries that are hard to navigate linguistically or in terms of terrain — and I’m sure I’ll do them again. I have my eye on a trip to Mongolia. But for places where maps and cycling trails are plenty and many people speak some English, I lean more and more to self-guided.

A few years ago, I did a completely unplanned trip in Bavaria with a couple of friends. We had one map, a few euros, a couple of tents and hired bicycles. Because one of my friends was living in Germany at the time and understood both the etiquette of camping there and could speak German, I felt comfortable pitching tents in random fields as needed, though I preferred campgrounds or guest houses for the showers. We had no plans, and no real destination — just five days to cycle. We took a train from Frankfurt to somewhere random to start, and at the end, got on another train. It was great.

I’ve realized that I really like the sensation of traveling fully from a set point to another point, seeing both the glorious and the mundane. My second last night on this recent trip was in a weary working town with only one utilitarian guesthouse hidding at the back of a soviet-era apartment block behind a steel door. I enjoyed this as much as the flourishing resort town the night before.

For this trip, I wanted something between the totally improv option and the thoroughly guided. I wanted a narrative-friendly route – a distinct from A to B that had some heft to it, I wanted to go to a couple of countries I’ve always wanted to see, and I wanted a trip with some weight to it that would make me feel like I’d had both an experience of seeing new places and also accomplishing something significant.

Enter Baltic Bike Tours. They do tons of guided trips, but also offer this self-guided option where they give you a decent bike, a route and a bunch of maps, and book places for you to stay. This was important to me, because Latvia and Estonia are very rural outside Riga and Tallinn, and I didn’t want to camp. It was important to me to have a destination I could predict with a bed at the end of it.

They offered the option of transferring my bags from place to place for me, noting the bags would be there by 5 or 6 every day, but I declined that for two reasons. I’ve done that before on point to point hiking trip, and I found it frustrating to not always have my bags there right when I arrived, especially if it was rainy and cold. (This also happened at the end of the Bike Rally last year, when I was running around an old convent in a towel looking for my bags).

More important, though, I wanted the sensation of having transported myself and all my necessary things fully on my own across more than 500 km. There is something really spiritually gratifying to me to be able to say that at 52, I have the capacity, the strength, the fortitude to propel myself and a loaded bike across a significant distance, by myself. Since I got on my first bike at the age of 8 and it became the way for me to explore by myself the towns near the one we lived in in Germany, my bike has been the most grounding place for me, the way to feel in harmony with the world around me. Sam posted a story the other day about a long-distance cyclist and why she likes to ride alone, and there were many echoes with what riding alone for me does. And for this trip, that meant being fully self-supported.

As I wrote in my daily posts, the ride was sometimes challenging, particularly with the wind and occasionally, with rain and confusing navigation. But it also brought me right to the edge of the sea, and past the intimate spaces of rural lanes, and the rhythms of mornings in small towns, and the kindness of people to fieldpoppies by the side of the road. And every day as I pulled into that night’s home, I felt a huge sense of myself at my best, the kind of inner affirmation that goes past words. Just me, exploring, finding, reaching.

Tomorrow I’ll post a bit about the practical side of doing this kind of trip.

Last Saturday’s ride was wet. Also plagued by flats, three of them, and I forgot to charge my electronic shifting so I spent the last 25 km in a single gear.

Luckily the shifters are designed to dump you into a nice middle of the road gear before giving out completely.

The ride was, however, completely redeemed by the wonderful company of Joh and Sarah. I love riding with Joh and Sarah.

Here we are!

Anyway, during the ride I got to thinking about cyclists and lies. Not the lies we tell non cyclists but rather the lies we tell ourselves.

The lies cyclists tell are rather notorious. See The lies cyclists tell in Canadian Cycling Magazine.

Here’s some that seem relevant to today’s ride:

The ride must start at 9

Reasoned completely a priori thusly. There’s an early start and a later start for bike rally rides. Long rides start early. It must be 9 and 10 am because that makes sense. So this is 103 km so we need to be there at 9. Except no. It’s 8 and 9 am. We need to be there at 8. It’s a half hour drive to the start. Whee! Zoom!

We’ll be back by noon

Every single group of cyclists has someone along who believes this. It doesn’t matter how far we’re riding or when we leave, we’ll be back by noon. Except it’s 103 km. At the sweeping pace that’s 5 hours riding. Plus stops for lunch etc. Leaving at 830 after the last rider. That’s never seen noon, as my father might say. More like mid-afternoon. More like 3 pm when everything is said and done.

It won’t rain on us

Yes there’s rain in the radar, all day, everywhere, but it’ll miss us. We won’t get wet. It felt good to say that, to think it. But it wasn’t true.

The wind will turn in our favour

We have a wicked wonderful tailwind on the trip out. I scored a bunch of personal bests on Strava segments I’d ridden before. None of it was my doing. Thank you wind. Sarah said she thought, or hoped, that the wind might turn and follow us home. But it never does. Or rather it only ever does if you have a headwind on the way out. Then the wind might turn and give you a headwind both ways.

Anyway, really it was a pretty good ride. Wind and rain and mechanical issues aside.

You can sponsor me in the bike rally here: https://secure.e2rm.com/registrant/mobile/mobilePersonalPage.aspx?registrationID=3654465

I’m on the sailboat visiting Renald this week and that means one of two things on any given day. Possibility 1: I’m out and about on land, covering lots of ground and hitting my step challenge target (if you’re wondering why I’ve got a target for daily steps, here’s the story of how FOMO got me to commit to another 100-day step challenge). Possibility 2: I’m boat bound (which is not always a bad thing in a general sense) and it’s tough even to get 5000 steps because everything I need is fewer than 20 steps away).

Sometimes there’s a mix of these two, where we go to shore but we park really close to where we plan to go. In any case, the upshot is this: it’s easy to get to the end of the day and fall short of my 13500 target (which I made a conscious choice to keep at this relatively low daily goal precisely because of the amount of time I spend on the boat each summer).

There are lots of ways to make up steps as the day comes to a close when you’re at home. You can go for a walk or a run later at night, for starters. I know quite a few people who do that. At the condo, I can even zip down to the treadmill if I like.

But my favourite way these days is to dance for those steps. It’s fun, easy to do anywhere (the other night I danced around my hotel room in Syracuse where I overnighted on my drive to Newport), and amazingly efficient at clocking up steps with the Pulse counter that I use (I’m not sure whether other gadgets count dancing).

Last night after Renald and I got back from the Jaws Summer Party (a live band followed by a screening of the original Jaws — so much fun), I was short a couple of thousand steps. “Let’s dance!” I said. And so for the next half an hour or so we took turns picking songs from Spotify and had a dance on board. It was a fun way to close out the night, dance with my partner who I don’t get to see all that often, and hit my step target.

At home I rarely have this issue. I’ve got my routines down and they include more than enough walking to surpass my daily goal, usually way before the end of the day. No last minute scrambles (or dances or walks around the block) needed.

As I said in response to Sam’s post yesterday about “Completism,” I lean in the “completist” direction. If I have a goal or target, I like to hit it. Like if we’re going running and we set out to do 10K, and we somehow get back to our starting point and we’re 0.3K short or something, I’ll drag you around the block. If my daily step target is 13500, I am not satisfied to go to bed with 13247.  So I like having ways of making up for missed steps before bedtime and dancing is a fabulous way.

How do you (or do you?) make up for shortfalls in your daily target at the end of the day?

If there’s one thing that I have a hard time to coming to terms with that limits my fitness goals and aspirations you might think it would be my weight. But you’d be wrong. Instead it’s my knees.

I’ve blogged lots of about my knees. See On not having the bee’s knees and saying goodbye to soccer. See Physio promises and running dreams. See Injured but not out.

I was back in knee physio this spring and for the first half of summer. I chatted lots with the wonderful physio guy, Brian, about aging and exercise and “why doesn’t everyone over 50 just see a physiotherapist regularly?” It’s income of course, and benefits. But he says even among those with benefits and income, it’s also attitude. Lots of people think of pain as normal aging. If a thing hurts and you’re getting older, just stop doing that thing. And in some cases stopping doing that thing might be called for (me and soccer, too much twisting and turning and torque on joints with insufficient cartilage)

Athletes, by the way, don’t think that way. They’ve had a career of injuries and see physio as part of training. How do we get more people to think like everyday athletes?

Because the point is in lots of cases you don’t have to stop doing that thing. Running isn’t hurting my knees. I’m assured the kind of distances I run aren’t making things worse. I’m not wearing out my joints. I’ve learned a lot of stretches and exercises that help with knee pain.

There’s nothing that alarming or unusual going on with my knees, just boring old osteoarthritis. Severe grade cartilage degradation, the report from the MRI says. I have a knee surgeon. I have a physio dude. I’ve given up soccer. I worry about Aikido. All that kneeling.

So mostly I’m feeling good about physio but a friend posted something the other day that was like a slap on the face. It was a quote, a meme, a thing about not going back to activity X until you’ve fully healed an injury. Good advice, right? But I realized reading that that I’ve stopped thinking about my knees as “injured.” It’s more like, that’s how my knees are. They aren’t going to get better.

If I keep doing physio, all of the time for the rest of my life, I might be able to ward off knee replacement surgery. My knees are nowhere near that yet.

Watch this again. But it’s worse after 50 because multiple body parts!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzEhoyXpqzQ

And running, according to physio dude, as long as it doesn’t hurt, won’t make them worse.

So it’s not an injury so what is it, a chronic condition? Normal aging? It’s just the way my knees are. I can maintain a pain free state if I keep my running distances down, don’t play soccer, forgo kneeling at Aikido and do a half hour of physio a day. That feels like a lot. I’m going to go back to the list of things I can give up. I’ll see if there’s more there that I can ditch besides flossing!

My knees have got me thinking about what is possible, what’s normal, and getting used to what my body can and can’t do. It’s an issue connected to the how we think about the range of human abilities. It’s also connected to aging. Tracy blogged recently about aging as a choice. While it’s true that some aspects of aging are optional, I don’t feel I had much choice about my knees and cartiledge degradation.

But I’m still running, still riding my bike, and still pretty active even with my creaky knees.

Among my cycling friends there are those who are completists and those who aren’t.

What’s a completist? Among my friends, completists are those who cringe when they see me post Strava rides of 98 km. Says Cathy, “Would it have killed you to ride around the block a few times?”

Cate is a classic completist. We set out to ride 150 km to mark Canada’s 150th birthday. There was hail and thunderstorms. Sarah and David cut it short at about 120 km. I got a flat shortly after that and called home for a pick-up. I hate fixing flats in the rain. But Cate soldiered on. In thunder and lightning she rode up and down the bike path until her Garmin clicked over 150 km. I was happy to ride another 46 km the next day. I didn’t feel the need to finish what I’d set out to do. I was happy to mentally re-describe the task at hand as riding 150 km on the Canada Day weekend.

I smiled when I read on Cate’s blog about her decision to forgo the train on her travels in Estonia and Latvia. She wrote, “I had a fleeting thought that I could stay in Haapsalu an extra day and then take the train to Tallin. After all, 400 km on a loaded bike was nothing to sneeze at. But I’m a weird completist so I packed up, got on the bike and left.”

I thought about Cate when I decided to watch Game of Thrones Sunday night rather than ride my bike 7 km. Why 7 km? I set a weekly distance goal on Strava, 150 km. Usually during the summer, it’s pretty easy to meet. Bike commuting plus errands is 50 km or so. I often do a couple of short rides on weeknights, maybe another 40 km. And then there is a long ride on the weekend. I decided I’m happy to ride 157 km next week instead. That’ll be easy since the bike rally starts next Sunday and Day 1 is 110 km.

How about you? Are you a completist? Do you accomplish exactly, to the number, what you set out to do? Or are you like me, happy to redescribe and complete in spirit if not the letter? How much leeway do you give yourself?

I don’t like to rant (well maybe a little bit, sometimes). But the “yoga and” trend is starting to get to me. Regular readers may recall some recent posts about goat yoga – I wasn’t a fan (a judgment I formed without having to try it) and Sam thought it was fun when she went with her son Gavin.

Lately, there are so many different forms of yoga. I don’t mean Iyengar, Ashtanga, Moksha, Kundalini, and the many other styles of hatha yoga (the branch of yoga focusing on physical exercises) we practice in “the West.”

I’m referring to the abundance of trendy combinations of yoga and…

• Yoga and goats
• Yoga and beer
• Yoga and wine
• Weed yoga
• Naked yoga
• Yoga on paddle boards

No doubt this is not an exhaustive list.

I used to be a purist, having been enculturated into the precise and detail oriented practice of Iyengar yoga, that it took many years before I was even willing to try hot yoga. And when I did, I was critical of the level of instruction even though I enjoyed the hot room. See my post about that here.

I now love hot yoga, in part because at least at the studio I go to (Moksha), the approach is less rigid than what I’m used to. You can go at your pace. Lie down in savasana whenever you feel like it. The instruction is less intense – they just take you through a set sequence and focus on helping you know when to breath and when to release. Iyengar would be appalled!

But my willingness to step out of the rigid methods I grew used to through 14 years of dedicated practice through an Iyengar studio has its limits. Moksha? Okay. Yoga on the beach in the Bahamas? I’m there. I’ve even attended a yoga for runners class.

I felt my eye first start to twitch over “yoga and…” combinations when I read about beer yoga. I even blogged about it.

I teach in a Department of Women’s Studies and Feminist Research, and we are always resistant to the idea of “women and…” courses. These are courses like “Women and History,” “Women and the Novel,” “Women and the Law.” What’s wrong with them? From our perspective they don’t necessarily capture what women’s studies is all about. For example, they might lack a feminist approach, just highlighting women without actually embedding the course content in a broader narrative and theoretical framework that talks about oppressive social structures. You can’t just tack something onto “women” and think you’ve got it right.

Similarly, you can’t just combine yoga with whatever and think you’ve got it right. Now I’m no expert, and maybe if you can lure enough people into it for the beer or the goats, at least a few will stick around for a more authentic yoga experience.

I know it sounds judgmental of me to presume that beer yoga or weed yoga are not “authentic.” You never really know until you get there, I guess. Like, your “Women and History” course may actually turn out to be full-on feminist. But I’m just saying, to keep the analogy going, you have a much better chance of getting the real deal if you sign up for “Feminist approaches to History” than what the first admin assistant I worked with in Women’s Studies and Feminist Research used to call an “add women and stir” course.

I’m especially resistant to the attempts to combine yoga with mind-altering substances like beer, wine, and pot. It doesn’t just seem unnecessary. It seems counter to paying mindful attention to your body, which is surely one of the benefits of yoga. How about going for your beer or your joint when you’re done, instead (if you must)?

On the other side of it, maybe it’s time to lighten up. I get that I can be too serious. Gimmicky yoga can be fun, and why should my own puritanical insistence on “authenticity” (which, for all I know, is not even a yoga experience I’ve even been party to) be taken seriously by anyone? If you want to take a yoga class where you balance a beer bottle and take periodic swigs from it, go for it.

Then the small voice inside says: But is the yoga tent really that big? Can we add yoga and stir and still have the result be something we can call “yoga”? I just don’t know.

Here’s a great tongue in cheek overview of “yoga and chicken nuggets”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-fPmIRhT_8

What are your thoughts on the latest yoga trends and gimmicks? Harmless fun? Useful introductions? Misleading appropriations? Some better than others?

As you all know by now I commute these days in dresses, with spd sandals, and bike shorts underneath. I arrive at work, dressed for work, which I like. I can run errands in street clothes. I also like looking like a not-scary cyclist on the multi-use pathway.

I don’t quite look like this.

Or this,

More like this,

Or this,

There’s a speed limit of 20 km/hr and I work, most of the time, to stay beneath that. There’s also geese, and senior citizens, and moms with strollers doing baby and me fitness classes, not to mention long boards, kids learning to ride bikes, and off leash dogs.

So the dresses suit the mood of my commute. I’m low key, I’m enjoying the scenery, and I’m smiling. I have friends, fast cyclists, who don’t use the multi-use pathway because it’s too dangerous.

I’m happy to go slow and wish people a good morning. In the morning, wearing a dress, I’m that kind of rider. See My new cycling dress and Riding bikes in skirts and dresses.

And here’s what my ride to work looks like.

Note that when the multi use path ends, there’s a stretch of road through a neighborhood next to campus, across the university bridge and up the big hill to the center of campus. Having gone slow all the way to that point I’m usually rested and ready to climb that hill quickly.

So my good day of bike commuting involved shaking one rider’s perceptions of what women on commuter bikes, wearing dresses, are capable of doing. Here’s my Facebook status: “Nothing like a young thin guy on a road bike giving you the “yeah I’m faster than you look” and going ahead of you at the light to get your second best time up university hill. The first best time wasn’t my commuting bike and I wasn’t wearing a dress. Sorry for passing you. It isn’t a race I know. I just hate that look and the judgement.”

Whee!

What surprised me was that I came within a second of my personal best on that hill, achieved on a road bike, in cycling kit. That day in a dress on my commuting bike, with stuffed panniers, it took me 45 seconds. My best time ever up the hill is 44 seconds. That’s my PR on that segment. I won’t ever beat Kim who holds the QOM at 29 seconds but that’s okay. It’s a hill.

That was a good day on my commuter bike, riding in a dress.

Here’s my commuter bike, at rest, after a bike ride home. I often enjoy a coffee on the front porch, in the quiet, watching the world go by.

Now my bad day bike commuting in a dress happened when I was running errands after work. I had to go to the bank, to the glasses shop, and of course, the bike shop. Hi To Wheels!

While riding downtown this guy started yelling at me. “Hey, lady. Put on some pants!” Keep in mind I’m wearing bike shorts under my dress.

“You can’t ride a bike in a dress. Nobody wants to see that.”

See what? My bike shorts? I was confused. But not really. As a larger woman, an older woman, in cycling clothing there are always angry men ready to make it clear how much they hate seeing my body in cycling clothes. I’ve blogged about it here. My theory is that fat hate plus misogyny plus hatred of cyclists makes me a target for abuse. I push too many buttons.

But really, really, I don’t care. I love riding my bike to work and about town. And I especially love doing it in summer dresses. Screw them.

Here’s another picture of my very pretty and super sensible commuting bike.