Dear fellow Tiptree cyclists,

I am back in Tiptree after three weeks in France having had, on the cycling front, rather more adventures than I wanted.   It all started well, my wife Audrey and I rented for ten days a gite in the Haut Loire (the mountainous region in central France where the volcanic cones are found).  Each day I cycled the two miles steeply downhill to the nearby little town of St Julien Chapteuil to buy the day’s requirements of bread, patisseries and other indulgences, then returned to the gite by a less direct and less steep route, varied from day to day.  The countryside looked lovely, because it is at an altitude of more than 1,000 metres the Spring was less far advanced and the flowers and blossoming trees were spectacular.

We then moved to Vichy for five days for my nephew’s wedding, a chance to be reunited with family and friends we had not seen for years.

It was when we left Vichy to return to the UK, via a couple of B&Bs that disaster struck.  My bike was on the cycle rack that I have used for years.   The rack clips to the rear door of our Prius and is well designed to resist any violent motion ahead or astern, but is poorly designed to resist centripetal forces when one goes round a corner. Rack and bike dropped off when I was navigating a roundabout in the suburbs of Vichy.  I though that I was lucky that there was no other traffic.  I was able to return, collect bike and rack and, with the car on the grass verge, reinstall both to their former positions after I had bent parts of the rack back into their former positions.

Clearly I didn’t do well enough.  A few hours later, while driving fast and straight down a main road, rack and bike fell off again.  Again I was very, very lucky.  The road was quiet, a French motorist travelling in the opposite direction stopped with his flasher lights on until I had returned, thrown my ruined rack deep into the roadside bracken and carried my mangled bike back to our car where I removed the wheels and fitted it into the car.

Home in Tiptree the damage to the bike is listed as:  2 wheels buckled, front fork twisted, frame out of true, saddle damaged.  Colchester Cycle Stores have persuaded me that it will cost almost as much to have my bike repaired as to buy a new one of similar quality, so I have bought a replacement  and am looking forward to the next  Tiptree Velo 10mph run with coffee and cakes.  I hope to see you soon!

Jack Isbester