From today Cycling Plus will be getting out on the road to promote the health, fitness and environmental benefits of bikes. The first ever Cycling Plus Roadshow will start from our Bath offices at 12pm when we fire up the CPMobile – our fantastic Hummer H3 – and set off around the country.
We’ll be loading our bikes on the roof of the Hummer and driving a total of 1,950 miles as we head to John O’Groats via Land's End, London, Holyhead and Norwich. On the way we’ll be stopping at schools, offices and women's prisons to extol the virtues of swapping the car for the humble bicycle. We’ll be stopping at plenty of petrol stations too and it’s here that we hope to persuade drivers out of their cars!
Of course, there’s more to cycling than road riding, so in conjunction with our buddies on Mountain Biking UK we’ll be taking our Hummer off-road and driving deep into the heart of some of the UK’s best trail centres.
“Driving around the UK in our awesome Hummer, with its powerful 3.7 litre engine and impressive 20mpg fuel economy, is the perfect way to get the message out that riding bikes is the way forward,” says Cycling Plus editor Rob Spedding. “Our bodies and the earth are precious commodities and the bicycle is the perfect way to preserve both.”
We're also hoping that a number of famous names – Jeremy Clarkson, TV chef James Martin and newspaper columnist Matthew Parris for instance – will take a seat in the Hummer to help us get more people riding. "And we're not going to finish with Britain," says Spedding. "Once we've completed our road trip we plan to take our campaign European. We're in negotiations with an airline as we want to cover a jet with Cycling Plus logos and use it to ram our message home."
