A Raleigh Shopper Festival Adventure

BYOB (bring your own bike) to a festival

I've always brought bike stuff to festivals. Lights to use as torches/ wear, a puncture repair kit for air bed punctures, waterproofs for all the rain. For this year's Camp Bestival at Lulworth Castle in Dorset I brought a bike to go with all my bike things and loaded it up so I wouldn't have to carry stuff. Walking in mud is so last season.

You know when you were a kid and your parents used to make you lie about your age to get on busses for free. No? Me neither. Aaaaanyway, this is where I said to my Raleigh Shopper 'If anyone asks, you are a fold up'. IT SO DOES FOLD. Please don't make me prove it. Also note the Ortleib pannier bags that were kindly lent to me that each cost more than my bike.

I rode from Wool to Lulworth Castle along a road that looked like hayfever.

We made it. Check out the tiny castle and massive swan.

Raleigh Shoppers glamp it up.

A festival friend.

I packed my wetsuit (FYI, wetsuits make great sleeping mats) so we ran away from camp to Lulworth Cove. Here is the Shopper being all bad ass posing with a tank by Lulworth Gunnery. 

I locked up here, giving it a sea view.

I went swimming which made me the cleanest person at the festival. If I lived here I would swim every day. The water is so beautiful.

After an idyllic weekend of cycling around the countryside it was time to leave. I came out a different gate and got lost. This is what I saw. Natures.

Then all I saw was corn, my phone didn't work and I had gone too far to go back so I had an existential crisis and cried at my bike. You haven't lived until you've cried at a bike.

Then in the far distance I saw a road. I peddled as fast as a bike with two sturmey archer gears that work part time could take me (it's my double speed). 

When I got to the station I was a different person. I hugged my friend and said 'GET ME BACK TO LONDON'. The whole train journey was filled with me talking about 'my experience'. My friend said 'aren't Raleigh Shoppers meant for quick rides to the shops?'