A friend of a friend flies gliders at the Ulster Gliding Centre down the road. I was encouraged to visit. "He used to race bikes. He restores old planes. The place is amazing, you'll love it."
Terrified of flying and armed with only the vaguest notion of what gliders actually are, I nonetheless head over there one evening. The phrase "restores old [fill in the blank]" proves to be excellent bait.In honor of the occasion, I ride a 1938 Tyrone Flyer, handmade in Northern Ireland.
Astride the 75-year old machine, I race down the winding coastal road, at length turning onto a narrow lane toward the Lough Foyle. I ride past pastures, chicken coups, a thatched cottage, and a field of parked caravans, until finally a meadow comes into view - spread out along the water's edge and littered with small aircraft. From a distance the scene resembles a vegetable patch.
By the hangar, Owen waves me through, bike and all. We exchange greetings and straight away his eyes are on the bike.
Owen used to race 100 mile time trials. He was good, right up there at the top. Then he stopped. But I can see the cycling has not left him. If he sees a bike, he can't not look at the bike. Then it's my turn to look at the planes.
A hangar is basically a garage for aircraft. This one is dome-shaped. The interior is well illuminated. There are little planes everywhere and I wander through them as if through a forest, stepping over tails and wings as if they were felled tree branches. Some planes are colourful and others are white, some fairly new and others quite old. Owen restores the old ones.
I ask about the materials, the paint, the provenance. Most of the machines are British or German, WWII era. We talk about plastics, and how they've changed over the years (a topic I'm familiar with from my fountain pen collecting days). Then he shows me the cloth used for wings - stretched so tautly and painted over so smoothly, I would never have guessed it was cloth.
The planes are so light and small, they seem toy-like. "I could take you up in one of these if you like?" I shake my head in horror, which I quickly try to disguise as a polite "I wouldn't want to impose."
So what exactly is a glider? Put simply, it is a small airplane without an engine. A non-motorised plane. Visually, gliders can be distinguished by their lack of propellers(although there are alsomotorised gliders, which do have propellers)and their unusually long wings.
Because a glider does not have an engine, it cannot take off under its own power and relies on a tow-plane to bring it up to the desired height, then release it.
Once airborne, the glider uses streams of rising air (thermals) to prolong the flight, as the pilot steers it. In this manner, the glider can stay up in the air for hours and even travel cross-country. "Cross country without an engine?" I said, growing interested in the mechanics of the thing.
Long story short, I ended up in the glider. Owen - as most of the pilots there - has such a steady, reassuring manner about him, that the more we chatted the more it began to seem like a good idea - just a normal way to spend an afternoon. "There's no engine, so nothing can go wrong, you see. It's a bit like cycling really. Take your camera!" Yes, it would be like cycling.
I was feeling pretty good as I approached the glider, until another pilot - Gary - handed me a parachute. "Here, put this on." I must have turned white and begun to inch my way backward (OMG why do I need a parachute??), because Gary sort of held me in place and swiftly began to put the parachute on for me, cheerfully instructing me on its usage while gently nudging me into the glider. "There. It's like getting into the bathtub."
In fact, the thing is sort of canoe-shaped. The pilot/instructor sits behind the student/ passenger. There are duplicate controls. There is very little room, and once the top is down, you feel sealed off from the rest of the world. Once I was in it, my attitude was - If you're gonna do it, do it. Otherwise don't do it. No point being scared now.
As Owen began to rattle off a series of mysterious control-check messages into the radio, Gary grabbed the rope attached to the glider's nose and connected it to the tow-plane.
This is what it looks like to be towed along the grass runway. We are taking off toward Lough Foyle.
Here is the rope.
The take-off is quick and painless. Before I know it, we are being towed through the air.
View from the ground.
Finally, the rope is released. The tow-plane returns to the ground and the glider - well, it glides. I am in a small plane. Everything is completely silent. We are floating, coasting really. I am feeling fine. Calm, downright serene.
The landscape spreads out beneath. Familiar places from an unfamiliar vantage point. In that sense, it really is a bit like cycling. In an abstract sort of way.
We fly along the coast, then turn inland and head to Binevenagh Mountain. Owen explains how to work the controls to make the plane bank, turning it around. It makes sense and I give it a try. The plane turns. And there is Binevenagh, half submerged in shadow from a low cloud, half illuminated by intense sunshine. It looks quite tame from here, flattened out against the landscape. My heroic climbs and descents hardly seem like an accomplishment now.
On the very top of Binevenagh is a mysterious lake. It is up a rough gravel road and I've only made it up there once so far. The lake is eerie, prone to mists and unusual growths around its edges. When you're standing next to it, it looks as if it is about to pour off of the edge of the mountain.
But what you don't see from the ground, is that the lake is distinctly heart-shaped. It is also nowhere near the edge of the mountain when viewed from an aerial perspective.
My camera is with me in the glider. There is a small window that slides open to stick the lens through. I've no experience composing aerial photos, and my 50mm lens is all wrong for the task. Even as I take them, I know that my pictures will look generic, uninteresting. But they are mine and I take them with the same genuine enthusiasm as anyone would.
The sun fades gently in the silence.Over Magilligan Point, we see another glider in the distance and wave to them.Everything is beautiful. "You all right?" Owen asks. Yes! This is wonderful. "Want to try a Chandelle?" he says. "Oh. What's that?" It's a maneuver. A bit of fun. Not quite aerobatics, but almost. "All right!"
The glider does something that is part spin, part freefall and part loop. I see clouds. I am not sure which way is up. I feel pressure in my temples and my vision starts to go dark. A split second later, I am drenched in a cold sweat and hit with a wave of nausea. I sit very still and take deep breaths. "How was that?" Owen asks from the back seat."Mmm hhmm hhmm!" I reply, mouth closed, worried I will puke all over the nice glider if I try to form sentences. Point taken. No more aerobatics. As the sun sets, we descend.
On the ground, I am soaking wet - hair, clothes, everything. Weird, the physical reactions we have. I don't remember feeling scared, but my body must have decided otherwise. We have a laugh about it. Then we steer the plane down the grass runway toward its next tow.
Is gliding anything like cycling? Hmm, I don't know. Maybe the feeling of landing is similar to that of a long descent. The view can be similar too. But on a bicycle everything feels open, whereas in a glider you are closed in, closed off - a bit claustrophobic for me. Not that I don't want to do it again. But perhaps no Chandelles just yet. It could be a useful skill, knowing how to fly light aircraft.
Some day. But for now I get back on the Tyrone Flyer. I pedal uphill, coast downhill. That is more my style of gliding.
As you may have noticed, we are staying on the coast for a little while - our annual working vacation. This is something we've been doing at the end of every summer for the past six years. When we lived further North, we used to go to a place in Maine, and after moving to Boston we began staying on Cape Cod. I've been writing about that for the past two summers, and it's funny how over time our trips became increasingly bicycle-oriented. Two years agowe went by car as usual, but for the first time took bikes and cycled around a bit during our stay. Last summer we arrived by car again, but got around entirely by bicycle once there and attempted some high mileage day-trips. This summer we no longer have a car and really did not want to rent one just for the trip. So after discovering that Cape Ann was accessible by commuter rail, we decided to come here instead and do the whole trip on bikes. Another reason for choosing Cape Ann, is that it is a popular starting point for long rides up the coast of Northern New England. There are no decent routes north directly out of Boston, and what cyclists often do is take the commuter rail up here before proceeding north. So that was the plan: To arrive on our bicycles, to get around by bike, and to cycle up the coast as far and as often as possible in the course of our stay.
Our main challenge was figuring out how to transport our belongings. This is not a bicycle-specific trip, so we needed more than a change of cycling clothing and rain gear. We are living here for two weeks and doing all the same things we do at home - including work-related stuff. We needed our regular clothing and footwear, personal hygiene products, bedding, towels, laptops, a variety of electronic devises, some necessary books and documents, and our camera equipment - in addition to the cycling clothing, tool kits and raingear. And all of that we fit into the luggage you see here.
For a number of logistical reasons, we decided the most practical course of action would be to turn one person into the pack mule - and since I already had a front rack and a large handlebar bag on my bike, it made sense that this would be me. I had planned to eventually get a touring-specific rear rack for my Rivendell anyway, and so that is what I did. Between the two of us, we packed a total of five bags for the trip - four on my bike and one on the Co-Habitant's.
The rear rack on my bike is a Nitto Campee with removable lowrider panels, to which we attached a set of Carradice panniers, while using the rack's platform to support a Sackville SaddleSack. These bags plus the Carradicesaddlebag on the Co-Habitant's Surly contained our clothing, bedding and laptops. My Ostrich handlebar bag contained camera equipment, electronics and various other miscellaneous items. Everything was packed very tightly, and I estimate that my bicycle weighed around 100 lb when all was said and done.
The ride to the train station from our house is 4 miles through some of the busiest parts of the city. I have never ridden with my bike loaded up like this before, and the prospect of trying it for the first time in Boston traffic was nerve-wrecking. Overall, the bicycle handled fine. Once it got going, I could not feel the weight at all, and the heavy handlebar bag did not affect steering. But at very slow speeds - especially when starting and stopping - there was a fishtailing effect in the rear that took some getting used to. Also, with so much weight on the bike, the brakes were less effective than usual, which I had to keep in mind when stopping on a downhill. The frame itself had an interesting feel to it - as if it was "yielding" to the weight (mildly flexing?). The resulting ride quality was in some ways nicer than with the bicycle unloaded. Having survived this ride in traffic, loaded touring on the open road does not seem in the least daunting. Going slower than usual is, of course, a given - but the reduction in speed was not as drastic as I thought it might be. Even cycling uphill (which I got to experience once we arrived to Cape Ann and rode from the train station to the place we are staying!) was not as difficult as I expected. Thanks to a helpful reader after my description of our previous commuter rail experience, we were able to board the elusive bike train, which made the trip more pleasant still. 
Once we arrived and settled in, we removed the lowrider panels from the rear rack, transforming my bike from a full-on pack-mule into a lighter ridethat could still carry food and equipment when necessary. I will write more about this particular rear rack in a separate post; it is pretty neat and versatile.
The place where we are staying is somewhere between a cabin and a shack on the architectural spectrum and is the size of a small garage. It is situated on a rocky cliff overlooking the ocean, and there is a beach down the road. Despite the stormy weather, we love being here - just the two of us and our bikes. Yesterday the sun finally came out and we did a 50 mile "warm-up" ride, hoping for more soon. And it feels great that we were able to drag all of our stuff up here without needing a car. It was important to us that this did not feel like a compromise compared to the previous times we've gone away, and it most definitely does not. We were able to fit everything we need into our bicycle bags, and not having to deal with a car here feels extremely relaxing. I highly recommend giving traveling by bicycle a try!
Zeus in Greek mythology is the king of gods and men.
Mythos lager beer.
Lays, Greek style, in olive oil naturally.
The incumbent president of the Philippines is called NoyNoy (his nickname).
Greek sweet delicacies: Baklava and Kantaifi.
Ouzo flavoured loukoumi with the famous secluded beach spot of Zakynthos on the foto, Navagio and the Caretta-Caretta endangered sea turtle.
I'm sitting on what I think is part of an old wagon for hauling out the logs that were cut in this little canyon all those years ago.
