Circuit Ride Recycled – Part 2

In which our intrepid protagonist enters Poland, where he finds the trails - and the food - not entirely to his liking...

Testing spells and spelling tests

Stage 2, day 3 (Sunday, 25 July 2010)
Trutnov to Szklarska Poręba (84 km)

Funny things, borders. As I cross into Poland, where I’ll be spending the next day and a half, I feel like I’m somewhere new, somewhere alien and exotic. But the birds and the bees above my head don’t see it that way; they just see more of the same. And the beetle scuttling across the path in front of me just sees more colossal pebbles and towering blades of grass to negotiate - although maybe he should be paying more attention to the bicycle tyres bearing down on him at speed. Oops, sorry Ringo!

Circuit Ride Recycled – Part 1

Given the complete lack of posts here since last July, you might be thinking that I’ve hung up my cycling shoes for good. But you’d be wrong. Yes, my mission to circumcycle the Czech Republic has been on hold for far too long now, but I’m looking forward to completing the job this summer.

I haven’t been entirely idle on the Circuit Rider front. I’ve been answering plenty of cycling-related queries, and I’ve even met up with a few people in Prague through the blog. If you do have any questions about cycling in this part of the world, I’d be very pleased to hear them. You can e-mail me via my profile.

To get the blog rolling again, I've decided to re-publish six of my favourite posts, one from each of the six previous stages of my ride along the Czech border. It’s a re-hash, I know, but I’m hoping it will get me back in the circuit-riding mood as well as sending out a message that this project is still a going concern.

I’m calling this series Circuit Ride Recycled, and it starts with a post from the rain-sodden Stage 1 on of my trip, which I rode three years ago almost to the day. It’s only the second day of my journey, and things are already going awry...