andy jennings

Here in Australia the days are getting shorter. The nights a bit colder. So naturally thoughts turn towards ... lights. I run with two lights at the front, and two lights at the back. Surely this is a bit paranoid – why two? I'm talking about lights for commuting in a major city. With mostly bright street lighting. Not for touring. When the sun gets low in the sky I think of only one thing: stopping and putting up the tent. I don't like doing this in the dark. I used to be an Audax rider. If you are planning on doing all night rides, then look up the rules for Audax lighting. They know what they are doing. Some of my set-up comes from that background. Let's start with the back lights. Nothing special there. Running on rechargeable batteries, I have one on the seatpost and one on the frame. They are both visible when the bike is fully loaded. Why two? Well rechargeable batteries have one problem – when they run out of charge, they usually do this fai...

In 1989 I moved to Japan with my family to start work at the Kansai Advanced Research Centre, in Nishi Akashi. This was south of Kobe, a new research centre. We had an apartment about four or five kilometres from the lab. To get to work I could  get two buses, which took quite a while. But I decided to ride a bike. I hadn’t ridden a bike for a long time. But I just thought I would try it. Several times at the start I got lost. People always insisted on coming with me to show me where to go. Such kindness. It was in early Autumn. I can still remember struggling up the steep hill on the red bicycle. It was just a standard household bike - no gears. It took a long time for me to be able to make it up the hill without getting off and walking. But I was determined. I kept riding all through the winter. Even when it snowed. Coming down the hill at night, the sun setting early it would be really cold. A couple of times I couldn’t feel my fingers. Then I couldn’t fee...

The movie “127 hours” is about a weekend trip. I really relate to that rush at the start to get to where the trip starts. Lately I have been reduced to weekend tours. Just Saturday and Sunday, since I have work stuff on both Mondays and Fridays. It occurred to me that this is the situation for a lot of people, so I share here both the tour itself and how I plan them. It’s highly individual what people carry and how you go about things. But I find it valuable learning from what other people do. If you live or visit Melbourne and you want to do a two day tour, then this might be useful. Or even use parts of it for longer rides. This ride is from Cowes, across to Morwell. Cowes is south of Melbourne. In my case I got the train to Stony Point and then the ferry. It’s nice to get out of the city to start. In fact I find the outer suburbs really tough. There are usually not bike paths or bike lanes and the traffic is pretty intense. Ideally I’d like to start about 300km fr...