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Oliver from Island Cottage Holidays has left the car at home and has been traveling around the Island, making visits to holiday cottage owners and taking photographs on his bike. After two weeks he would like to say thank you to some people.

Oliver writes:

I have had a very enjoyable two weeks going car-free on the Isle of Wight and have been surprised about how easy it has been. Many of the places i’ve cycled to have been accessible by cycle track and bridal way, which means I haven’t had to worry about traffic at all, and along the way I have been able to enjoy parts of the Isle of Wight I didn’t even know existed.

There have been times when cycling hasn’t been as convenient or enjoyable as it might be but this has been outweighed by the help and support I have received from people along the way. I would like to take this opportunity to thank some of them.

A big thank you to Wight Cycle Hire (www.wightcyclehire.co.uk/) with whom we have has a long relationship with hiring out bikes to our holiday guests. They lent me their own Ordinance Survey Map from the shop in Yarmouth when I left mine at home thus saving the day when I was trying to navigate the bridal ways from Yarmouth to Newport.

Thank you to White Mountain Bike Shop in Newport (www.wightmountain.co.uk)
who fixed my bike so quickly when it completely fell apart while I was riding up onto Appuldurcombe Down. They got me back on the road in under an hour.

Thanks also go to the young lady at Farmer Jacks Farm Shop who stopped to help me get all my shopping in my tiny biking rucksack after I had shopped without any thought for how I would get it all home. The lemon marmalade, which I thought I would have to leave behind, was very good.

Help just when I needed it came from a man walking along the cycle path to Newchurch. He held my bike while I untangled some foliage from the front gear. It took much longer than I thought and he waited patiently while I finished. We had a nice chat about the Island Games while I was grappling with the problem. Thank you to him and i’m sorry I didn’t catch his name.

An especially big thanks to all those who stopped and helped me when I took a big fall near Alverstone one evening while trying to avoid colliding with a badger. I braked much too hard and ended up in a contorted heap on the ground. They checked all my arms and legs still worked and got me to my feet. Sympathy and smiles are amazingly effective medicine in these situations.

Finally, a general thanks to the places I visited with somewhere to lock up a bike, to pubs which didn’t mind me being muddy, to road users who passed me with plenty of space and not on blind corners, to our cottage owners who didn’t mind me smelling of sweat, and to the taxi driver who let me put my muddy bike in his car when I broke it far from anywhere.

Thank you to them all.