Bicycle adventure

I've now finished the book One Man and His Bike by Mike Carter. I found it while in a bookstore in Liverpool last summer. With my love for both bicycling and travel it looked like a good one. Carter feels he needs to escape his life in London and while cycling to work he wonders what it would be like to keep following the Thames out to the coast then keep the sea on his right side. So he does. He spends 5 months seeing how beautiful England, Scotland, and Wales are and how friendly (and sometimes eccentric) the people are. Though the hills of Scotland and Wales are beautiful the hills leading to Land's End in southwest England are brutal -- exhausting to ride up and too steep to enjoy coasting down.

Even so, as he cycles back into London some 4600 miles later and feels the city closing around him he ponders (for a moment) taking another lap.

I quite enjoyed the book and will look for his other, something about motorcycling to the four corners of Europe. Like this one I'll have to read that one with a map in front of me.

While in Cardigan, Wales he spends a few days at the Do Lectures. Ordinary people talk about what they are doing to set the world (or at least their corner of it) back on the proper course. Here is an excerpt from a talk by Alan from Network World:

There must be no more linear thinking. We have to get back to where we want to be as human beings. We make, you buy: people are profoundly uncomfortable with this, about being turned into mere units of production. The thing that made us fundamentally human in the old days was high levels of participation in society. We don't just want to be defined as consumers. We are in a spiritual crisis, we've lost our moral anchors. Even George Soros says that we're living in a closed society when we're only measured by our material wealth. Even he wants an "open society." An open society should not just satisfy us but inspire us.

I learned a tidbit about place names. Dartmouth is the town at the mouth of the Dart River. Cycling along the coast one encounters lots of places with that kind of name, like Plymouth, Bournemouth, Portsmouth, Weymouth, Exmouth, and Falmouth.