Thursday, June 28, 2018

Riding in the snow

The eagle-eyed reader of this blog will have noticed a blog just over a year ago (19 May 2017) about winter cycling in Finland. I was recently sent a link to short film about a group of hardy souls cycling across a National Park in Finland in February - "Arctic Cycle" under https://www.groundeffect.co.nz/blogs/news/. Lovely photography. The film is well worth watching.

Ground Effect is a biking clothing company in New Zealand (www.groundeffect.co.nz). They make good gear, in fact great gear. We have a number of their biking jersys and shirts. We started buying stuff from them because the company offers summer weight cycling jerseys with long sleeves. I have suffered from skin cancer so I prefer to wear clothing to cover up in the sun rather than using a sun cream. There is only one problem: The clothing is fairly priced, but there is a sting in the tail. Not only must one pay duty and VAT on the clothing when it arrives in Europe, but also when the goods are presented to customs, you need to pay the carrier - £8 in the UK for each package for this arduous work if you have your order sent air mail. If memory serves me rightly FedEx, the other carrier used by Ground Effect charges more. If your order comes in two packets it can get quite expensive.

Monday, June 18, 2018

East Frisia

Ostfriesland (East Frisia) is the stretch of Germany between the Dutch - German border on the River Ems to Wilhemshaven. It is great cycling country criss crossed by cycle routes with a multitude of bike hire shops.
The people of East Frisia have the reputation of being slow, non intelligent. There are large number of East Frisian jokes in German often the same as Irish jokes in English. If the East Frisians are thick which I doubt, they have been sensible enough to adopt the Dutch knooppunt system of route guidance. This makes navigation very easy. We have been trying for some time to persuade the local cycling club to push for the adoption of this navigation aid, but the attitude appears to be one of  “I know how to get to where I am going. Do we need any more navigation aids or GPS systems are more than adequate.”

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