Under your own steam

What is the furthest you have ever travelled from home under your own steam? I know that many of you have gone far further than I have ever achieved. I would be interested in your stories.

Long time ago, when I was fifteen, half my family planned to travel to the Iron Curtain – not a well-known tourist trap but one of the most impactful structures in Europe at the time.

We set off from west London all panniered up and raring to go. Before we got to the end of our street I found that one of my tyres needed a little air. My father, with my sister on the back of the tandem, said “you pump it up and catch us up on route”. In moments I was on my cycle and my brother and I raced to catch up with my father and sister.

A mile had passed and we still had not caught them up. We thought they must be travelling at a blistering speed – maybe two on a tandem can go faster than two fit teenagers. When we got to Lewisham we decided to call home. Remember that in those days there were no mobiles and answerphones were extremely rare. There was no answer so we carried on to Dover.

We called again from Rochester, still no answer so we thought that they must still be on route. We were getting peckish at this point. We had little cash so we decided to eat what food we had in our panniers. Unfortunately, we only had a packet of dry macaroni so we ate that in stages. We did not want to eat it all at once because we thought we might explode once the macaroni had absorbed the liquid in our stomachs. There was still no news at Canterbury so we carried on to Dover.

Once we arrived at Dover we got an answer at home. Our father said that as we got lost so quickly we couldn’t risk going on the continent so we should come back home.

We had enough cash for a stay in a hostel overspill on a gym mat and a tin of beans for supper. The next morning we cycled all the way back to London. We had no cash and no food so we scrumped – Kent is not called the garden of England for nothing.

Cycling across Blackheath my crank broke. Cycling with one pedal is possible but very difficult. Fortunately, a driver stopped. On hearing our story he felt compelled to take us to New Cross underground station and he paid for our tickets to Turnham Green – a short walk from where we lived.

We discovered that when my father and sister left us they had not gone along the agreed route – instead they took a “short cut” (or as we called them a duck-shove) so we probably passed them as we cycled along the main road – and this all within a mile of our house. The reason our calls home had not been answered was because on returning home my father went to sleep – he was a very deep sleeper – and my sister went to visit a friend: so they could not hear the telephone ring. However, that evening my father decided that, on balance, it would be possible for us to continue the holiday. So the next morning we cycled to Dover again.

We missed the ferry and we never made it to the Iron Curtain but that is another story.

But we did cycle 82 miles in one day, and 82 the next and 82 the next before we took the ferry. Despite the adventure I guess it only counts as 82 miles before the sea got in the way. That is the furthest that I have travelled from that day to this.

How far have you travelled from home?