I’m in London! UK Vlog

I recently took a little trip to London along with a bicycle! Here is a little vlog talking about some of what I got up to. Detailed videos will be coming soon!

Follow me on Instagram @spinningtruecycling

Thank you for showing your support by liking, subscribing & commenting.

what’s going on guys so i just wanted to do a quick little vlog video inspired by the vlog i did when i was in san francisco so here i am walking this is white hall and downing street which is obviously where the prime minister lives is right over there the houses of parliament are further back that way and uh to be honest i’m kind of surprised that that video i did in san francisco got as many views as it did because it was one of those that i started filming and wasn’t really too happy with it for a couple reasons first of all the sound quality was pretty bad if you watch some of the amtrak and california videos i did you might notice that they’re cut together kind of weird and that’s cuz i was dealing with a lot of wind that’s bad audio and actually i just got some wireless microphones it’s the road wireless mi inexpensive but it works really really well i just don’t have it with me right now and so that really forced me to want to upgrade the audio and follow my videos cuz it’s just better and it makes the editing better and easier as well okay so what am i doing here in london well london is actually one of my favorite cities um you know i lived in the uk for 5 years and i’ve talked about how my experience wasn’t that great but as a city i really like london and i kind of wanted a city break and one of the things i came here for is something called the world naked bike ride it happened yesterday i just filmed a little clip earlier talking about that so here you go so one of the things i did in london was actually the world naked bike ride if you don’t know what that is that is an event that happens once a year all over the world basically you get naked and you bike around usually through a city the og one is here in london so there’s actually about five or six or at least a handful of different naked bike rides all through london but the one that i joined started here in this little square which is right across from clappam junction which is the train station right over there and the london naked bike ride is you know something i really wanted to do but i wasn’t sure that i’d have the confidence to pull it off but i did i did it the full monty and uh this square yesterday was full of more naked people than i’ve ever seen in one place at a time there were hundreds of hundreds of people here we cycled to central london it took a couple of hours and more people kept joining the procession as we got there and then by the time we got to central london there were probably thousands of us so the thing is that nudity is something that is apparently legal in the uk and it is it is something that’s pretty normal in a lot of cultures my mom is from germany and nudity like german people are basically naked all the time but uh some cultures have more of a problem with it and some people do as well and for me personally it’s something that because i grew up in the us i guess um i found it kind of difficult but you know then just did it you know everyone else is naked so it’s kind of like the great equalizer right you know if everyone’s naked you’re all the same and it was really cool so uh yeah i really enjoyed it and we had a lot of support from the public as well most people were very supportive lots of cheering everyone was kind of ringing their bells it was a lot of fun now the question is would i do it again and the answer is probably not now don’t get me wrong it was a great experience overall really enjoyable awesome for body positivity just really freeing and the first part of the ride was actually pretty relaxing because we were in a big group and we had marshals that were blocking traffic so that wasn’t an issue but when we got closer to london it just kind of devolved into chaos there were just so many people at one point we had to stop in this square and they had a security company that the naked bike ride organizers had hired that was kind of ushering us around and traffic was honking at us and also people were cycling so slow that it was kind of dangerous because i couldn’t really balance the bike very well i had to put my foot down a lot i actually saw two people collide and tensions kind of seem to run a little higher and it just wasn’t quite as fun anymore so i think it was an awesome experience overall but and i would definitely recommend it if you ever get the chance but i probably wouldn’t do it again just kind of coming up to trafalgar square here and i believe that buckingham palace is down this road behind this construction site so the other thing i’m doing in london is spending a lot of time going to the theater i love the theater and london is a great theater city there’s tons of stuff to see here and you can often get really expensive inexpensive tickets so one of the first nights i was here i saw a play called a comedy about spies which is just fantastic really really funny really well done i had pretty terrible seats i actually missed part act one but it was still worth it my ticket was like £13 it was great and then uh today i’m seeing something called titanic titanic it’s a musical comedy based on the movie i’ve never even seen the movie but it has really good reviews so i’m about to go see that and of course i’m doing some cycling which you know i try and do that as much as i can whenever i’m anywhere but of course we have the boris bikes or the santander bike so bike sharing scheme and um i’ve used that a little bit but i also brought a bike that i’ll talk about more later which is the stoogge rambler all righty so this is picadilli circus you can see the screens over there there’s a protest happening over there theaters’s right here sician but i got to kind of laugh at this look at how many people trying to get into the hard rock cafe i mean isn’t one hard rock cafe exactly the same as any other hard rock cafe or is it just me maybe it’s just me okay what it actually is is one of those street shows where in my experience they do a lot of talking hype it all up and then don’t actually do a lot but stop being a cynic stop being a cynic going to the theater and i’ll talk to you guys afterward all righty well that was amazing titanique really really good show i didn’t understand half the cultural references and i’m going to have selen stuck in my head for the rest of the night but really really funny well worth seeing um pretty loud my ears are kind of ringing but i really enjoyed that and the best part is it’s not even dark yet it’s 9:00 but there’s still some daylight i’m going to head down to the river and uh let’s show you some of london just going to skirt through a little part of st james’s park while i tell you about what else i’ve been up to here in london so i’ve seen two theater shows i did the naked bike ride but i also have my stoogge rambler here and another thing i did is i did a bike packing loop called the downs overnighter which is about 110 mi starts in guilford which is really close to london and then you bike down an old roadway track down to worthing and then you bike along the sea for a little bit then you get on to the south downs way which is a uh long-distance hiking route but it’s also a biking route and you kind of go through the british countryside really really nice uh spent the night at a place called kitur hill that’s in wild camping and that was actually my first experience with wild camping aside from in some national forests in the us but had a good time with that the next day did a lot more biking through the south downs and then sort of back up through some bridalways and you know countryside and also some roads back up to guilford so two nights 110 mi and there is a video or there should be a video coming out about that as well so if you are interested in that you should have the chance to see more about that in my other video but um i do want to mention a couple things first of all it was definitely worth it if you’re ever in london and you want to do bike packing uh it’s really easy to get there by train and if you have a bike i would recommend it the other thing is that it is described as an easy route on bikepacking.com which is where i downloaded the gps guide and read about the route but i would say that is not easy look at this movie makers luxury 9 position makeup some kind of filming going on here this is pretty interesting so the reason i thought it was difficult and i’ll explain this more in the video is because the uk has some pretty big hills and i figured out that the roads and paths just seem to go straight up and so they’re pretty long fairly steep hills but when i got home i actually uploaded the route to strava and it came out as the second most climbing i’ve ever done in one day and that’s including all the strava segments that i uploaded from when i was cycle touring in switzerland so the second day of the downs way i actually climbed 1,600 m actually it was a little more it was like 1,670 m in about 100 miles or about 95 km and that’s more than when i climbed up to the obus in switzerland which is a pass a mountain pass at over 2,000 m of course i didn’t start at zero but when i did that day i only climbed like 1560 m there was one day in the alps when i climbed over 2,000 but i mean i i it felt hard i didn’t realize it was quite that much climbing it wasn’t quite as steep of a gradient as in the alps in the alps i think the 1600 m day was done in about 75 km but it was still a very impressively high amount of um i guess elevation change in one day at least for me coming from michigan where it’s pretty flat so it’s i i don’t know if i’d call it easy necessarily um but it was a a really nice little two-day bike packing loop and i i really enjoyed it actually you know what i think it was steeper because i forgot that i was only on the south downs way for less than half of that second day of of the bike packing route maybe 25 mi or so and after that it was actually pretty flat so maybe it was steeper than in the alps cuz in the alps the 1600 meter day was straight up the dualbot bus so and you know it took 75 miles kilometers so you know impressively steep terrain here in the uk and so it was quite difficult just from the terrain and it was also off-road okay we’re coming up to another famous landmark here this is of course buckingham palace where the queen used to live but now we have the king and i i believe that he doesn’t really come here is my understanding but still really interesting landmark and this is a really interesting part of london because it’s super traffic control there’s not a lot of traffic here at all so it’s actually extremely pedestrian friendly and very bike friendly and lots of green space and it’s just kind of a nice place to come and just in a way get away from some of the oppressiveness of the city cuz there are some cars but it’s not really like other parts of london or other really car ccentric cities another little view of the mall here as i cross this road all right we’re walking in st james park here and if you look through the trees that way you might be able to just see the lights of the london eye the big ferris wheel just through there okay so other things i’ve been up to in london well today i went to a museum but it wasn’t in london it was actually by gatwick airport and it was an airplane museum very small museum i took the train to gatwick and then biked over there and it was kind of a nightmare to get there it was really confusing cycling around gatwick but the museum was pretty cool really small not expensive to get in just a couple of planes and some engines and things but the layout was really cool they had a big field there and you could walk through this field and then actually get to a plane spotting site and watch some of the airplane takeoffs and landings and i actually did try and do some filming there and i was gonna do this vlog while i was at that museum but i had problems with my microphone and that’s probably a good thing because it’s better to be walking around in london than standing in the field but it was still pretty cool also as i was going to the plane spotting site i just saw the end of an a380 landing i kind of missed most of it but it was still pretty cool and uh yeah it was it was worth worth going there i mean it it wasn’t it wasn’t the most amazing thing i’ve ever seen but it was something a little different and just kind of fun to see okay and here we are coming up to another famous london landmark can you see it there just at the end of these buildings while we’re getting there let’s take a look at this segregated bike lane this sort of thing is becoming much more common in london london is a very walkable place but it is becoming a much more bikable place and it’s really been noticeable in the last okay i was here earlier this year but before that it had been about 5 years and the improvements are really really noticeable way better bike infrastructure than there had been in the past and it’s always those incremental improvements that usually lead to big change and i’m in a group of people now in lancing michigan that we’re kind of hoping to do the same thing for our local community there okay so there we have the clock known as big ben i believe big ben refers to the bell but anyway that is of course attached to the houses of parliament which are over there and then across this little grassy space we have westminster abbey all righty well that is pretty much all i’ve been up to here i do have two more days left and i might leave london again tomorrow maybe go down to the sea maybe brighton or hastings or maybe bike between them or bike between hastings and eastborne we’ll see but i’m kind of thinking get out of london and then the last day i’ll probably bike along the temps and maybe take the uber boats and maybe do a video on that and i have been doing a little more filming here um i did a couple videos on the bike the dude’s rambler and i’ve got a couple more little things planned so you might see some videos from england coming out again which is pretty cool look at how many people are here this is crazy it’s 9:30 at night on a sunday but this is a really busy and touristic part of town it’s also beautiful weather i’ve been really lucky it only rained a little bit during my bike packing tour but it’s been sunny 70s fahrenheit you know 20s celsius and just amazing weather considering this is england which has a reputation pretty neat view there towards london and actually pretty cool view of the houses of parliament as well all righty well now we are just crossing the river and i think it is time to call the video here i’m going to go back to the apartment and have some dinner go to bed and get ready to enjoy the rest of my trip all righty and now we’re on the other side of the river walking along the south bank actually i’m pretty far west of where a lot of the you know classic sort of attractions and things are the skate park the tape modern the millennium bridge things like that but i think this is going to be the place to call this video so i hope you enjoyed that little vlog and figured it’d be kind of fun to you know make a little video when i travel somewhere just of what i’ve been up to but if you are interested in some of the specific things i mentioned you can look out for those videos coming out on the channel and as always thanks for watching take care and i hope you have a great rest of your