The Story

Day 1 & 2 [Penzance → Land’s End → Tintagel]

Somehow we were behind schedule before the real trip had even begun.

The plan had been simple: fly into London, enjoy a cheeky pint, and catch a train to Penzance a couple days later. (Penzance is near Land’s End, in the far southwest of the United Kingdom.) We knew weeks in advance when our train to Penzance was going to leave. We knew how difficult it had been to get a bike reservation on the train. And, yet, just twenty minutes before our train was scheduled to leave we found ourselves perusing London’s bike shops. 

“Isn’t our train supposed to leave in, like, 20 minutes?” Brett said.

“Oh, true.”

We mapped it on Brett’s Apple Watch: 23 minutes. To make matters worse, we hadn’t picked up our tickets yet; a task we would have to do upon arrival at the station. And so you could say that one of the highest-adrenaline moments of the entire trip was here, before the trip started. I cannot imagine what we would have looked like to an onlooker at Hyde Park as we raced through. I’d rather not know.


We made it in the end with two minutes to spare, which according to the train security people was not enough time to actually board the train. This seemed odd to us because, well, the train was right there, and we could board in ten seconds. We made it clear we planned on getting on anyway and so they kind of relented, grumpily. Grumpy train people were a theme in the UK.

Later I would be told we had a classic UK train experience: seriously overbooked and more than an hour late. (Our reserved bike spots were taken, too, so we stayed in the hallways with them.) Luckily the people in the UK turned out to be far friendlier than the popular stereotype would have you think. In my hallway I got talking with a group of women who told me their husbands had “a little band that sings fishing songs.” (The band was actually Fisherman’s Friends, a seriously popular group that has two (!) movies about them.) They wrote me a list of what we should eat in the UK: mostly a lists of cheeses and other snacks, like scones. After they had departed I shared a bottle of Prosecco with a fellow passenger who also did not really have a seat. 

And so on, and so on.


Eventually we arrived in Penzance. 

And then here we are in Land’s End, at the start of the trip.


On the first full day we climbed up and out of Penzance and then followed a sort of wet grey marshy canvas until Truro, where we had lunch. I do remember that my big bag fell off my bike a few times. And that we lost Cooper in a forested stretch. And that, just a few hours into the day, one of us said: “We’re going too slow.”

In reading an account like this you cannot forget the time pressure that we were under: our flights out of Inverness were in 10 days, which meant we really needed to be done in 9. And so it was during this first lunchtime in Truro, just hours into the trip, that we called an audible.

“Hey,” Cooper said, “I’m not sure about this whole ‘gravel LEJOG’ thing.” We were on gravel bikes, you see, and had originally planned to follow a mostly-gravel route designed by the gentlemen who run Malvern Cycle Sport. But the morning had been grueling: 15-plus percent grade up rough gravel. Singletrack through the forest. Paths that felt out of time, unused for decades. These are nice places to be if you would simply like to explore but when you need to go fast, well… Cooper had a point. The guys at Malvern Cycle Sport, I think, are simply far better cyclists than us. So at once we pivoted to a slinging-from-the-hip approach: opening the RideWithGPS app and clicking around until the route looked okay.

Change made, we biked through the old stone center of Truro and back into the hills.


My body temperature has never been higher than it was on that dark cold rainy afternoon as we turned up the west coast. We had just come up out of Wadebridge, a small and somewhat charmless little town on an inlet of the river Camel, and were carving our way up to the cliffs that tower over the ocean there. It had been long enough that day for our bodies to feel totally nonfunctional; we had already knocked out 60 miles and 7,000 feet of gain.

“Brett!” I shouted a couple of times as he got further and further ahead of me.

“Cooper!” I shouted a couple of times as he got further and further behind of me.

I was alone.

I wondered whether I could make the trip at all. I felt hotter than I’d ever felt. I was in my lowest gear. We were climbing a hill with an average grade of 12 percent, and it felt like we had been climbing forever. I could not tell the difference between the rain and my sweat, and frankly if it had stopped raining altogether I do not think I would have noticed. As the world started to get a little wobbly I turned off the music in my AirPods, stared down at the slow but steady rotations of my front tire, and focused completely on the sounds of the birds in the trees. I listened to the birds and nothing else until it was dark out and we were on a hill that was damn near straight up. And at that point no amount of bird listening was going to save us.

“I think this is one of those situations where—” I shouted to Brett and Cooper, who were also off of their bikes at this point. Not walking, just standing and thinking. (This moment appears in the video we made, which you can see on this website.)


“We’re not making it another 25 miles tonight,” Brett said.

“Nope,” said Cooper from somewhere down there in the mist.

We had arrived in a little town over a cliff, which we could hardly see as it was nighttime but which had the impression of being a beautiful town overlooking the ocean. Checking online to see that all of the hotels were full, we briefly considered biking in the pitch black for another 20 miles to our next hotel. But all of our lights were dead and so were our portable batteries.

Luck found us in the form of a girl our age, who said she worked at a hotel. Or not a hotel, but a castle-thing that was just a 10-minute walk outside of town. I must stress how improbable it was that we would stumble upon a woman our age on her way to work at a hotel at 8 P.M. at night, in the rain, on the outskirts of this town. The place had, I don’t know, 100 people? 200? This felt like a miracle-level event.

“I’m just coming back from a swim,” she said, to give context.

We looked around to make sure we had heard her correctly. It was sub-40 degrees now, and pitch black. The ocean must have been unbearably cold. “A swim?” 

“It’s just so lovely to swim there in the ocean when it’s pouring rain.”

And at once we knew we were dealing with the sort of free-spirited person that might, actually, understand our ridiculous situation and get us a room at the hotel. She did get us a room, in the end, and at a great discount. The hotel was owned by scientologists and was strange to us in some ways. But they gave us a comfortable room, and pizza. There was a poem on the master bed, which I swore I took a photo of but that I can no longer find anywhere in my camera roll.


So concluded an eventful first couple of days.

Day 3 [Tintagel → Dulverton]

We spent more than an hour the previous night going over the route. We had wanted to go to Bath but the numbers didn’t add up; we had only hit about 80 miles on the first day which meant that we were slightly behind for the second day, which meant that we could not go to Bath. (Ironically we did all need baths.)

Already we were beginning to make jokes about the improbability of success.

So we came up with a new strategy: instead of setting end-of-day goals at the beginning of the day, we would set them as close to nighttime as possible. That way, we could book hotels in the places we would actually end up. (The previous day we had unfortunately booked a hotel that we were not able to make it to.)

Rather than a goal, we had a direction: northeast toward Exmoor National Park.


The morning was full of brutal, but beautiful, ups-and-downs as we followed the coast. Soon we found ourselves climbing a particularly long (3 miles) and particularly steep (average 20 percent grade) mountain; so steep we eventually had to get off and walk. But then we did get to the top. Behind us you could only see the small one-lane road curving down into the forest, and in front of us you could see a great sweeping landscape; green countryside to the right and blue ocean to the left. We began to descend, hollering and shouting and taking in the best views yet.

We coasted, the hill steep enough to carry us at high speeds and in no rush to start climbing another one again. This was what we had come to the UK to see.


Later when we had turned further into the interior of the country we came across a series of towering hills. One after the other after the other. Like some sort of Mariokart race track, but designed for killing cyclists. Upon completing the last of these we stopped at a riverside pub.

“Where are you boys coming from?” An older gentleman asked.

“I don’t know. Uh, southwest?”

He laughed. “So you just biked the Torrington Hills?”

“…well, I don’t know. They were big hills.”

“It’ll be those, then. You’re crazy to bike them. They do a local biking competition here called the ‘King of the Mountain’ to see who can bike the hills the fastest.”


After some more conversation about the region and the now-extinct salmon fishery in the local river there, we ate our hot steak pies and drank tall cold pints and got directions to the place we had settled on spending the night: Dulverton. There were still more than twenty miles to go and so we needed to get a move on. It was only the third day but you really could feel every single muscle, every single tendon, every single nerve. Getting on the bike again was torture.

Every so often we would check the map to see how far we were from John O’Groats. Let me recreate a version of what we were looking at.



There is not much to say about Dulverton except that it was a pretty little place and the bike ride down its valley at sunset was excellent.


We did what you might expect to do after a long day without a bathroom. Then we discovered the toilet did not flush. It just sort of flooded. Stewed a bit. 

Around 10 P.M. we decided to solve the toilet problem.

“It must be the girls before you guys,” the hotel owner said. “I bet they put tampons in there.” A wave of relief washed over us as we realized the blame was not going to be placed on us. That was until Richard (the Man For the Job) arrived. Gloves on. Sleeves rolled up. He gave a great big sigh as he walked into the room. “Alright.”

“Well, first,” he said in a thick accent, “let’s see if it’s turned on.”

Richard walked over to a wall in the bedroom and flicked a switch none of us had noticed. The toilet made a pained whirring sound, a crunching noise, and all was well. Brett and Cooper were laughing. I was attempting to explain to Richard that we had never seen a toilet like this before.

“Yeah, well,” he said. “It really helps if it’s turned on.”

And, on that count, I cannot argue with the man.

Day 4 [Dulverton → Bristol]

Immense physical and psychological pain had become the base case. I could hardly move my legs. Cooper’s pinky finger was paralyzed. Even Brett’s knees were starting to give out. We were pushing nearly 100 miles and 5,000 to 10,000 feet of elevation gain each day, which has a cumulative effect on the body of an amateur cyclist that I find it hard to put into words.

Worse, our estimations had been too optimistic and it turned out we were, in fact, a day or two behind schedule. So we had to make some shortcuts. Bath was the first victim. The second was Wales. 

“It’s just too hilly,” I said. “We aren’t going to make it.”


So our optimistic target for the end of the day became Bristol.

We had learned how to trick the mind into pushing the body harder than it should go. I used the ‘stare at the front tire and listen to the birds’ method. Cooper had some kind of podcast in. Brett said he was listening to “the corniest music possible,” which in his case meant putting blink-182 on repeat. (Brett was not aware of the music that was playing in my earbuds, and I won’t repeat it here. What I’ll say is that if Kpop Demon Hunters had come out before the trip I would have been unstoppable.)

What else can I say? We were on the bikes. It was becoming clear to us that Cornwall, and to some extent Devon, were beautiful places, but that as we moved further up the country and put the dramatic coastlines behind us the beauty was somewhat more ordinary. Every so often there were green pastures hemmed in by white fences; there were little churches here and there. You would come across little pockets that looked like something out of a fairy tale: a small quiet cottage in a field next to a wood that looked all dense and dark and bundled-up. These were nice moments but they became fewer and farther between as we moved up.


Bristol itself, well, once again: what can I say? Its streets kind of sucked. We almost ended up on the M5. We had to cut across six lanes of traffic in a roundabout that was not meant for bikes. As darkness set in it was harder and harder to see the directions on my little Garmin and so I led us astray more than once. Patience was growing thin. Night was threatening to settle over the city.

Around 8 P.M. we found the hotel. A corporate hotel. One thing you learn on a trip like this is that a corporate hotel is a true gem, an oasis, compared to a mom-and-pop type of place. Why? It has a real shower with real water pressure; it has modern plumbing that you do not need to activate by flipping a switch on the wall; there are power outlets in logical places, like near the beds; it has real sheets; the comforter is not shorter than the bed; it has great air conditioning; it simply has everything the (disgusting gross weary sweaty sticky) traveler needs. 

We slept well in Bristol, peacefully unaware of the next day’s events.

Day 5 [Bristol 🚴 Birmingham 🚆 Edinburgh]

People from outside of the UK know about Birmingham because it is the city where Peaky Blinders is set. People from inside the UK seem to know about Birmingham because it’s shit.

We tackled a hill or two out of Bristol and found ourselves in flat countryside along peaceful canals. This was a relief for our legs. It was not a relief for the parts of us that wanted to see a beautiful United Kingdom. As we ventured closer to Birmingham my mind went back to a piece of wisdom the Cornish women had shared with me on the train: “Cornwall is beautiful, yes, and Devon and Somerset. So is Scotland. But in between, well, it’s not so nice.”

Not so nice, indeed. There were some pretty places, like Worcestershire. 


For the most part, though, the closer we got to Birmingham the worse the scenery became. And then there was another problem: we were falling further behind schedule. So Brett and I waited to regroup with Cooper at the next intersection. He pulled up with a sort of knowing smile on his face. 

“Cooper,” I said, “we need to make some big decisions.” 

He laughed. He knew.

“Honestly,” I said, “we can make it to John O’Groats. But we need to average about 115 miles per day for the rest of the trip. I don’t know if we want to do that.”

We talked a bit and the question soon became: do we want to risk not biking through Scotland so we can spend time in and around Birmingham? We decided no.

And so we did the previously unthinkable: we caught the next train to Edinburgh.


I would like to note that they are pretty good at bullshit in the UK. “I really would love to take you boys and your bikes,” the train conductor in Birmingham said as he gestured to a car on the train that had room for at least ten more bikes, “but we’re booked full.” We were a little upset, having paid the tickets, and mentioned the thing about how you could fit at least ten more bikes in there. “Gentleman, there’s nothing I can do. I would truly, truly love to, but we cannot take on more bikes,” he said, once again gesturing to a space that could take on at least ten more bikes.

“Okay,” we said eventually, staring wistfully at the empty train car that could take on at least ten more bikes. The woman working at the train desk was more helpful and got us on a new itinerary and our heads hit the pillows at 2 A.M. at a Holiday Inn near the Edinburgh Zoo. 

Days 6 & 7 [Edinburgh → Inverness]

I have been writing this by looking at the photos in my camera roll. From Bristol to Birmingham I do not have a single photo; from Edinburgh and beyond I have hundreds. We loved Scotland.


Edinburgh was nice, but rainy, which we were told is a typical Edinburgh experience. Here we took an afternoon to stock up on some rain gear, and to rest our bodies, and to drink. (Not because we are alcoholics but because there are only so many ‘morning rolls’ a man can eat.)


Part of the trip we did to Inverness on a train. The other part we did biking. The train we got from Edinburgh to Perth, and the biking portion we did from Perth to Inverness. We had planned to bike the whole stretch until we got a striking piece of news.

“Brace yourselves as two hurricanes barrel towards Britain,” the voice on a TikTok Cooper was watching said. That did not sound good, and upon investigation, it was actually true: a hurricane-like storm was about to hit Scotland. This meant we needed to make up ground faster than we would have been able to on the bicycles. And, thus, a cheeky train ride.

Day 8 [Inverness]

The locals told us there is basically one thing you can do in Inverness: get drunk. It seemed to be true because it is what everyone else was doing.

So we bought a deck of cards, Googled the instructions for Rummy 500, and played and drank and played and drank until the storm rolled through. What else do you want me to say? I guess I can show you a picture of the pub that was close to our hotel. It was a decent pub.


“What if we just got a train to John O’Groats?” Cooper said at one point. 

It was only kind of a joke.

Truth was that trip morale probably hit an all-time low in Inverness. For one thing you had all the rain and the wind and the darkness. For another all you had was pubs and all you could do was drink. And for another we had lost momentum; the first four days of nonstop biking had turned into on-again, off-again stints in between bad weather and necessary shortcuts on the train. And then there was the big part: our bodies were killing us. We could hardly walk at this point.

But the wind outside was 100 miles per hour. What were we supposed to do?

Day 9 [Inverness → Altnaharra]

Any good story must have its “heroes feel that all is lost moment,” which we had in Inverness. It must also have its “heroes find their resolve and defeat the villain in a grand climax” moment, which is what we were searching for as we crossed a big bridge over a big bay to leave Inverness and head into the real Scottish highlands. Luckily for us, Scotland has magic to spare.

Our target for the day was Altnaharra, a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere only frequented by fishermen. We were to be staying at a fishing hotel. Spirits were rising.

I hate it when people describe places on Earth as looking like “another planet” because it does a serious disservice to Earth. Why does it have to look like another planet? Why can’t it just look like Earth? However, if I were the kind of person who would use that cliché, well, I think I would use it in Scotland. The landscapes were vast and empty and cold. And, if I can say it, alien.


Our route that day took us into windswept landscapes with muddied rivers, up craggy mountains, through deep forests that crowded in at every turn. This was the kind of biking we had come to the UK to do. “Pretty sweet,” Brett said. An understatement.

It was still a difficult day, with more than 80 miles to cover, but at least we were back on the bikes for good and the weather was okay and the scenery was good. We had a spectacular and filling lunch at a restaurant called The Pier in Lairg. Their Sunday roast helped me regain a little (not a lot, to be clear, but a little) more faith in the cuisine of the United Kingdom. After that we climbed out of the town into the middle of nowhere.

Perhaps the best descent of the trip was the final 10 miles down towards Altnaharra. We were up high, of course, and down in the valley there was a little river that curved here and there. Deer trotted across the road from time to time. The skies were beginning to clear. It was cold but at a certain point you stop feeling the cold. In the distance you could see a lake, not unlike the kind of lake you might find in Patagonia or Iceland or similar, and we knew that next to the lake we would find our quaint fishing hotel. We enjoyed the long descent and the sunset.

The hotel was nice.

Day 10 [Altnaharra → John O’Groats]

Occasionally when you are out in nature you will come across sights that put a big smile on your face, whether you wanted to be smiling or not. The morning coming out of Altnaharra was one of those. We had the privilege of riding more than 10 miles along the long lake, and then the river, with wide open skies and a friendly morning sun. The landscape here is a mostly monotone canvas which makes for some wonderful contrast with sky and water.


In many ways, the trip ended the same way it began: with many (literal) ups and downs. We were following the coast again, heading east. As had become the standard during the trip we were each a mile or two apart while biking and then got back together again when the person in front, invariably Brett I’m afraid to say, stopped for a rest.

I caught up with Brett for a few moments.

“I want to pull off at the next café for a scone with clotted cream,” he said as we crested another tall hill with views over the ocean. “Just one more.” Scones with clotted cream had become our food of choice during the trip and are one of the few products of British cuisine that I would say could compete with any food on the world stage. A cheeky scone never hurt anyone.

We pulled off for scones, and sandwiches, and candy, and Cola-Cola, and coffee, and ice cream. A Very Hungry Caterpillar-coded pitstop. It was enough fuel to get us another couple dozen miles.


That un-erasable smile found itself back on my face as we entered that final stretch: the final 10 miles of the United Kingdom. We all pedaled as hard as we could; I felt like I was in a race. 

Once again, I find myself wondering what to say. 

Here we were, at the end of our odyssey. Here we were, at the end of the country. We had pushed our bodies to their limits; we had endured a hurricane; we had broken a toilet; we had eaten far more British food than any non-British person ever should; we had doubted ourself and the trip; we had been nearly denied boarding on every single train we took; we had been through the ringer. And yet here we were. On time. At the end. In John o’Groats.


There is no big inspirational send-off here because that would not be honest. The truth of it is that we were dead. We took our obligatory photo at the sign and crashed in our hotel. Which did not have power, still, because of the hurricane, and as a result did not have food. It was quite a grumpy afternoon actually until we got our hands on the takeout Chinese that evening.

And perhaps that was the most fitting way to end our UK odyssey: sharing a couple of pints and some soggy takeout Chinese from a pub at the end of the country. Bosh.