In my mind, there is no better tool than the bicycle to explore new ground. As the British cycling author Richard Ballantyne wrote:
It’s fast enough to get through the forest, yet slow enough to see the trees.
As a result, the Trip Of The Month is my favorite section of our 3T blog. We try to pick trips that are tough, epic, in cool locations but still attainable. The 3-day trips of the XPDTN3 collective are perfect in that way; you can retrace them on a long weekend and they allow you to escape to a completely different world.
There’s just one problem: the cool locations often require flying. And I hate flying. I can’t help but be in a plane regularly for business, but I don’t like it and for leisure I try to avoid them as much as possible. The hassle of airports, the annoyance of packing a bike, the environmental impact, none of it appeals to me.
Luckily, I always find enough to explore close to home, for example around the lakes southeast of Amsterdam.
But in blogs and other publications, it seems the exotic beats the local any day. Maybe it is cycling’s version of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard).
So I suggested to some friends we start a series of blog posts to sing the praises of local adventures: Not NIMBY but RIMBY – Ride In My Back Yard. My “rules” were simple:
- Start from home
- 1 or 2 days, so it fits within a normal weekend
- Text, photos and GPS files or it didn’t happen
- Have fun
Other than that, it doesn’t matter. It can be all about the riding, about the scenery, the cuisine, a landmark, on road, gravel or pixie dust. It’s just to appreciate what we have in our own backyard.
Starting next month, you’ll see RIMBY reports show up on the blog. If you have any great RIMBYs yourself, let us know and we’d love to feature them. We can’t promise we’ll feature them all, we don’t want to overflow the blog, but the best ones will definitely make it onto the blog and into our newsletter.