My partner and I took our bicycles on a short holiday road trip across part of Ontario, Canada to visit family and friends. It wasn’t a cycling holiday, but it was a holiday that involved some cycling. Road trip cycling was a new experience for us recent owners of a road bike (me) and an e-bike (my partner). Among visits, dinners, and museum trips, we managed to get out 3 times in 6 days.
Road trip cycling gives you a new way to explore new places. On ours, the weather was beautiful and the locations were scenic. After a few times, we got bike and gear extraction and repacking with the SUB down to a science. But it wasn’t issue-free.
A relatively new road cyclist training with a club, I was excited to explore longer paths mapped by other cyclists using my Ride GPS app. But I mistakenly assumed I would be leading the rides. I didn’t recognize it right away, but it turns out my partner had their own ideas about which way and for how long we should ride, decisions made more by feeling and impulse.
Our differences of opinion led to some frustration. The GPS-marked paths I chose sometimes had some longer-than-comfortable gravel stretches or were busy with “walkers.” The random paths my partner chose led to dead ends or us dodging traffic to cross busy roads. One time we each doggedly took what we thought was the best route … and lost sight of each other (phone call, waiting). Another time we got different advice from hotel staff on how to best get our bikes out of the underground parking lot, so we each stubbornly took our own ways up topside.
When cycling alone or with a club, I have learned, there is generally a single and shared vision of the ride. When cycling casually with a partner in new places, the path, duration, and speed must all be negotiated. You’d think we could have just laugh it off at the time, but when one of us had felt really uncomfortable based on a choice the other had made it wasn’t always easy to find levity.
Next time I will still plan our rides with maps, but I will also try to go with the flow, communicate more, and keep upbeat when something unexpected happens. Maybe we agree to alternate who lead the rides. Maybe we each get one “turnaround” audible per ride if things feel bad for one of us. Holiday road trip cycling is not only enjoyable; it can also be an interesting test of a partnership!
Who leads when you ride casually with a partner, family member, or a friend? How do you negotiate differences?
