§ i
Every journey begins with a turn
I don’t remember exactly where this photo was taken.
What I do remember is how it felt.
I had spent the morning riding through the Italian countryside, climbing hills, rolling past vineyards, and stopping every so often simply because something caught my eye.
Then I turned onto this quiet street.
There was no famous landmark waiting at the end.
No attraction circled on a map.
Just cobblestones, colourful buildings, and the feeling that I wanted to see what was around the next corner.
That is what a bicycle does to a day. It hands the day back to you. You stop when you want to stop. You linger at a café because the chairs are in the sun. You take the smaller road because it looks more interesting, and it usually is.
You feel the temperature change as you drop into a valley. You smell the cooking before you see the kitchen. You hear a church bell, a radio, someone calling to someone else down a lane.
A car would have carried me past all of it in under a minute. I would have arrived somewhere else, on time, with nothing much to say about how I got there.
That’s when I realized something.
“The best part of travelling by bicycle isn’t the cycling. It’s the freedom to discover places you never knew you were looking for.”
§ ii
Slowing down changes everything
When you’re travelling by bicycle, the world moves at a different pace.
Fast enough to explore.
Slow enough to notice.
You hear conversations drifting from cafés.
You catch the smell of fresh bread from a neighbourhood bakery.
You notice flower boxes on old balconies.
You wave to people sitting outside their homes.
I love a good train ride. I have seen beautiful country from the window of a car and learned a great deal from a good guide on a coach. This isn’t a case against any of them.
It’s just that a bicycle gives you a different relationship with a place. There is no glass between you and it. The weather is yours. The hill is yours. The wrong turn is yours too, and often that’s the part you end up telling people about.
And you arrive in a town from the same direction its residents do. Through the outskirts. Past the school and the hardware shop. Not dropped into the middle of the pretty part with two hours to spend.
Most travellers pass through places.
Cyclists become part of them, even if only for an afternoon.
§ iii
Seeing a place, and experiencing it
There is a difference, and it took me a while to name it.
You can see a destination from a distance. Photograph it. Tick it off. Move on to the next one.
Or you can move through it under your own power. Climb its hills. Coast down the other side. Stop in its cafés because you need to stop, not because the itinerary allows fifteen minutes.
On a bicycle you pass through the ordinary parts of a country as well as the famous ones. The neighbourhoods. The road between two small towns that nobody photographs. The petrol station where you refill your bottles.
None of that shows up on a list of things to do. All of it is the place.
You also participate in the small economy of a day. You buy the coffee. You ask for the water. You order lunch badly in a language you are still learning and someone helps you out, and for a few minutes you are not an audience. You are just another person passing through who needed something.
Seeing is something you do to a destination. Experiencing it is something you do with it.
§ iv
The roads I remember
People often ask me about the climbs.
The distance.
The speed.
The truth is, those aren’t the things I remember most.
I remember discovering streets like this one.
Finding cafés I never planned to visit.
Sharing espresso with friends after a ride.
Laughing over stories from the day.
Watching the late afternoon light settle over an Italian village.
And I remember San Marino.
San Marino is one of the smallest countries in the world, and it is completely surrounded by Italy. You ride toward it and it just keeps rising in front of you.
There are hills.
And then more hills.
Right about the point where you decide you have probably done enough climbing for one lifetime, apparently there is another hill.
You could reach the top of that country in a car in a fraction of the time. I know which version I remember. Arriving somewhere under your own power does something to the place. It stops being a viewpoint and becomes a thing that happened to you.
Those are the memories that stay with me.
§ v
The people you meet at cycling speed
Cycling in Italy, I met riders from all over. You end up talking at the top of a climb, or waiting at the same café, or riding beside someone for a while simply because you happen to be going the same way.
On San Marino I met a young couple who had recently become engaged. One of the ways they had decided to celebrate was to climb San Marino together.
We got talking, the way cyclists do.
They were from Mississauga, Ontario.
Less than an hour from my own home. Thousands of kilometres from either of our front doors, on a hill in the smallest country I had ever ridden into, and there we were.
You cannot schedule that. You cannot book it. It isn’t on any itinerary. It happens because you were moving slowly enough, and openly enough, for it to find you.
Some of the best parts of travelling by bicycle are the parts nobody planned.
“Some of the best parts of travelling by bicycle are the parts nobody planned.”
§ vi
Why effort makes a place stay with you
Effort changes memory. I’m convinced of it.
A view you have earned looks different from a view you have parked beside. Lunch tastes better after a long morning in the saddle. Cold water is never as good as it is at the top of a climb.
After long days riding in Italy, our group used to go down to the Adriatic.
Bicycles put away.
Tired legs.
Good company.
The sea was the same sea it would have been on any other day. It didn’t feel the same. It felt like the reward at the end of something, because it was.
That is the quiet trade a bicycle offers you. A little discomfort in exchange for a place you will still be able to feel years later.
I can call up that stretch of coast without trying. The light on the water late in the day. The particular tiredness that comes after a good ride rather than a hard one. Conversations that went on longer than anybody intended because nobody had anywhere else to be.
§ vii
The bicycle was simply the invitation
When I bought my first road bike, I thought I was investing in my health.
I had no idea I was investing in a completely different way of experiencing the world.
Cycling gave me confidence.
It introduced me to incredible people.
It took me to places I might never have discovered otherwise.
And the older I get, the more I notice how much that matters. Not in a serious, keep-fit sort of way. In the sense that staying active keeps the door open — to curiosity, to new places, to people I haven’t met yet.
Looking back, I realize the bicycle was never really the destination.
It was simply the invitation.
The Cycling Holiday Playbook
Planning a Cycling Holiday?
32 pages. 22 chapters. 3 PEDAL & PORT planning tools.
Get the Free Playbook§ viii
The kind of travel I want more of
I want the kind of travel where the day is allowed to change its mind. Where a café stop turns into an hour. Where the road you took by mistake is the one you describe when you get home.
Not the fastest ride. Not the longest list of destinations. Just the joy of moving through the world with curiosity, and enough time to be curious in.
PEDAL & PORT grew from that idea — and it’s the spirit behind the journeys in our Cycling Adventures collection.
One quiet street.
One conversation.
One espresso.
One unexpected turn at a time.
Whenever I look at this photograph, I don’t think about how many kilometres I rode that day.
I wonder what was waiting around the next corner.
That’s what I love most about travelling by bicycle.
The freedom to explore.
The freedom to slow down.
Because sometimes the most meaningful journeys begin with a single turn down a street you’ve never seen before.
