The coffee ride isn’t dead
There’s something about a coffee run. That something is that I truly love them.
There are plenty of factors that go into a quality cafe run, but the main factor is that you need the right group of friends. I’m sure you know what I mean.
My dad used to claim that the cafe run was the underlying reason why I started cycling. His ‘wild’ claim back when I started out in the early ’90s was that I’d only turn up on a Sunday club run (whatever the weather) so that halfway through I could get a fry-up. Yeah, a great British fry up, eggs, bacon, sausage, fried bread, beans, the job lot. All from a Cafe that was more than likely run by two kindly old ladies, with a patchwork carpet, a mishmash of tableware and the grub costing roughly the same as what you’d now splash out on a fancy coffee.
Now I’m not going to say my dad isn’t in some way enhancing the truth. Some of this may be true. But I know for a fact he’d never splash out for a fry up on every Sunday ride. Sometimes we’d just have a bacon bun. Plus in the summer it’d lay far too heavily in the stomach for that hilly ride home.
Whimsical memories are flooding back of some of the best cafes and coffee shops that I’ve had the privilege to park the bike out the front of over the years. There are the cheap and cheerful ones where you get a mug of tea the size of a bucket to keep your fuel levels up; then there’s the crop of higher-end cafes with their fancy coffee machines and frothy coffees. No matter what the sort, though, I for one can’t wait to get back to sitting out the front on a sunny day, feet splayed out in front of me, helmet not on a seat of course, with a cup of something refreshing in one hand and a tasty cake in the other.
Anyway, this is basically a long and winding way of me presenting to you my latest vid. As you’ll have guessed I’m missing the cafe run, so I thought I’d try and recreate it in the virtual world. It’s not easy, I’ll admit. In fact, it’s near impossible. There are no cafes in the Whatopia or any of the other Zwift worlds from what I can see. A massive missive if you ask me. But try I did, and along to help me out was Trek-Segafredo’s Latvian potato lover and friend of CyclingTips Toms Skujins. Obviously a man who should never need to go to a cafe what with his team’s secondary sponsor being a coffee brand, but like any good cyclist it’s inbuilt into him.
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