Cyclists

Cycling and sleeping in wine country

From our US edition

Tom Kevill-Davies and I are sitting on the deck of the Hungry Cyclist Lodge chatting about food and adventures. This enchanting forty-six-year-old man, a cyclist and a chef, arrived in the village of Auxey-Duresses in Burgundy eleven years ago, where he found an abandoned mill that was ripe for renovation. He met Aude, a local teacher, and they have two toddlers. Perhaps Tom is better known (but only slightly) for his captivating bestseller The Hungry Cyclist which he wrote in 2009. The book recounts his two-year-long trip by bike from New York to the beaches of Brazil. The Lodge is neither a B&B nor a gîte. Tom thinks of it as more like an auberge, “a home away from home,” he says.

cycling

If the office is ‘too dangerous’, why is everyone jetting off on holiday?

The whole of Surrey and south-west London seem to have gone abroad on holiday so I’ve got my sanity back. All the people who were working from home because they couldn’t risk Covid-19 but who had to go out walking and cycling in the countryside all day long have simply vanished. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many of the Covid-phobics have got on planes and enthusiastically breathed as much re--circulated air as it takes to get them to a villa by the sea. The cyclists and the runners and the ramblers with backpacks with cooking pots sticking out of the top have all evidently decided they didn’t need to bother me any more by trespassing through my horses’ field, and have gone somewhere they really wanted to be. That was half the problem.