The Nine Cycle Touring Books of Steven Herrick

Under normal circumstances I’d presently be in the midst of my annual six hundred mile pilgrimage to Cannes, cycling down from Paris.  Thanks to the pandemic, for the first time since 2004, I’m at home in May with no Cannes Film Festival nor Tour de France in my immediate future.  I would have been setting out in fine shape with over 5,000 miles in my legs after my traverse of Brasil earlier this year riding from Uruguay to the Guianas.

Though that was over two months ago, I’ve maintained my conditioning with daily forays gathering rocks, twenty-five pounds or more at a time carried in a milk crate on the back of my bike.  We’re turning our yard in a Goldsworthy rock garden. I have a number of gathering spots, mostly near rivers.  This is a hotspot of limestone, attested to by a giant quarry.  It defines the area to the extent that a sprawling shopping center with multiple stores, including a Walmart and Target and Petsmart, is known as The Quarry.

It’s been a fun project, adding to the many rocks we’d accumulated over the years, truly embellishing our surroundings.  In between these outings I have continued to vicariously escape my semi-confinement reading about being off to other places  Prime among them has been a vein of nine cycle touring books by Australian Steven Herrick, six of which included excursions through France.

Herrick was 53 when he commenced his touring career in 2012, two years after he had taken up cycling when he realized he needed to lose weight.  After several thousand miles of bicycling around his mountainous neighborhood, he had become “a confirmed cycling nutter,” and decided to head off to France to ride a popular cycling route along the Loire River and then capping his trip riding some of the storied Tour de France climbs in the Alps.

Since he was a writer, having written nearly twenty children’s books, he turned his journal into a book, “Baguettes and Bicycles,” and then returned to Europe the next six years for another ride and another book.  He brought his wife along for the next ride from Bordeaux into the Pyrenees, and she accompanied him on all the rest.  They range all over Europe, but France is their favorite country, so every trip except one includes a foray there.  The lone exception is their ride along the Danube, his third trip, recounted in “Bratwurst and Bicycles.”

They commence “Cycling North,” book number five, in Marseilles and continue to the fjords of Norway.  They followed that with “Cycling South,” starting in the highlands of Scotland and ending up in the islands of the Mediterranean including Sicily.  They couldn’t have been happier when they crossed into France from England, escaping the chips dominated cuisine.

Every book comes with the disclaimer, “Cycling is just an interlude between meals,” which Herrick attributes to his wife.  The books are extremely heavy on what they eat.  By his third book, and in nearly every subsequent one, he feels the need to defend his emphasis on eating and his style of touring, staying in hotels and eating in restaurants, which comes under criticism from the more hardcore touring cyclists who camp and eat food of their own preparation. He claims admiration for those willing to rough it, “more power to them,” is his repeated commendation, but sleeping in a “flimsy tent” and eating “noodles or pasta” is not for him.  He likes ending his day with a shower and beer and a long, leisurely meal “eating his fill“ and maintains it is a fine way to get to know a country, as if camping does not offer a similar opportunity.

It is a shame he never gave camping a try, as their environment and the people he would have met in campgrounds would have given him a much greater insight into the countries he bicycled through and much more interesting material to write about than all the food he ate.  Camping further emphasizes the freedom and independence that are the essence of traveling by bicycle, especially if one wild camps in forests and fields.  One is fully unshackled when one’s itinerary isn't dictated by sanctioned places to stay, and having to end one’s day prematurely when the cycling is too good to stop simply because there is no hotel or campground up ahead.  The self-sufficient cyclist can keep riding to his heart’s delight.  But eating, not biking, has a greater appeal to the Herricks.  They are appalled when they meet a pair of cyclists along the Danube heading to Turkey averaging 100 kilometers a day.  “How do they see anything,”  is their response, as if one can’t see anything from a bicycle seat.  Imagine if they met someone doing 100 miles a day.

By his eighth book, the first of two on touring in Japan, he’d become so sensitive to readers taking him to task for his dependence on hotels, he brags that his success as a writer of children’s books has allowed him to be able to afford to stay in comfortable accommodations, and adds, “I’m so indulgent I even travel with my wife.  Shoot me now.”

In all his books he regularly gives the cost of meals and hotels and frequently says they are a bargain compared to Australia.  A favorite phrase of his is to ironically add “princely sum” to the cost of something, as if it was next to nothing.   He is cost conscious enough though to be delighted when the WIFI doesn’t work at a hotel, because it invariably means he’ll get a free breakfast out of it.

His first few trips were on a bike he called Craig, in honor of the weight loss program Jenny Craig.  The children’s writer in him fully anthropomorphizes Craig.  He talks to it and gives it pats of encouragement and is concerned about its sleeping arrangements when it is forced to overnight in a garage. His wife’s first bike goes by Jenny.  He checks on the two of them in a garage one night and notices Craig’s handlebar is touching Jenny’s seat and observes, “She doesn’t seem to mind.”  Another night when they are cooped up with a bunch of other bikes he fears Craig has kept them up late bragging about the extent of his travels, something perhaps his owner is prone to do, as he mentions from time to time that people he meets are impressed by how far he has ridden and mountains he has climbed.

He develops the personality of Craig more than his wife other than to say she is beautiful and is a belly dancing teacher.  Her profession merits some commentary, but he offers not a single anecdote, unlike his references to his own career as a writer of children’s books and his occasional public appearances.  She is a mere ornament and rarely mentioned.  He does give her credit in book number six for introducing him to the term for a gathering of flamingos.  It is a “flamboyance.”  That must have sent him to an anthology of similar terms for other animals as in his later two books on Japan he drops in the term “murder of crows” with no explanation.

As far as his mechanical skills go, he admits it is a struggle to assemble his bike at the start of a tour, writing, “As a bicycle mechanic, I make a great poet.”  Once when he got a flat near a bicycle shop, he turned over the operation to the shop, though he otherwise manages on the road.  Before he climbed Mont Ventoux on his first trip he acknowledged he had to be capable of repairing a flat, writing, “What would I do? Cry?”  He is so ecstatic about conquering Ventoux, when he calls his wife back in Australia to tell her he is near tears.

Though he seems to know something of the Tour de France and racing, he makes no mention of the Australian icons Cadel Evans or Phil Anderson.  He doesn’t appreciate that each of the twenty-one switchbacks on L’Alpe d’Huez are named for a winner of the stage, thinking its “cheesy.”  He misspells the Alpe as Alpe de Huez in “Cycling North.”  That can be passed off as a typo, but not his comment that Tour climbs are rated from category six to HC (for Beyond Category), as the categories begin at four, not six.  Much more egregious is his assertion two books later in “Boulangeries and Bicycles” that climbs are rated from one to five with one being the easiest.  One is the hardest and they begin at four not five.

He is wrong too on one of the most famous incidents of Tour lore that he recounts in “Bordeaux and Bicycles.”  He states Eugene Christophe was disqualified from the 1913 Tour for allowing a young man to operate the bellows as he repaired his fork which he broke descending the Tourmalet.  It was a seven-year old boy who operated the bellows, and Christophe wasn’t kicked out of the race for the unauthorized assist.  He was penalized ten minutes, later reduced to three, which hardly mattered as he spent three hours completing the repair.  It is such a storied event that there is a plaque on the old stone building where it took place, and it was re-enacted on the 50th anniversary of the event with Christophe and the boy.

Since these are all self-published books it is explainable that such slips come through.  Another was spelling Johnny Hallyday, as “Halliday.” The books are far from typo-free.  They are dotted with a recurrent typo of  “a” before words beginning with a vowel (a old road, a elderly Dutch couple) and “an” preceding words beginning with a consonant (an steady, an poorly designed).  It is perplexing that these haven’t been corrected in the ebook versions I was reading.

One has to question his credibility as a touring cyclist when even by book seven he’s still lamenting there is no such thing as waterproof clothing. He’s not paying attention, as they are out there, such as the Arcteryx jacket that for years has kept me perfectly dry in typhoons and monsoons and day-long rains.

Herrick’s last two books on cycling in Japan, with the second beginning in South Korea, offer no explanation on why he moved on from Europe.  He did mention that he’d also cycled in Thailand and was at work on a book of that trip. The two Asia books were much shorter than his European books, just eighty pages.  I was fortunate to be able to read all nine of these for free thanks to a trial offer of kindle unlimited, which allows one to read as many books as one can for $9.99 a month.  Unfortunately, the majority of kindle unlimited books are of the self-published variety and doesn’t include many mainstream titles.   One can read any of  Herrick’s books for between $2.99 and $5.79.  He’s obviously found a market to keep cranking them out.

Though none of his books offer much more than the cycling journals one can find at Crazyguyonabike.com, they at least have the polish of a professional writer.  I kept reading them as they do give a glimmer of  that sensation of being out on the road.  If nothing else, he can be commended for being a strong advocate of cycle touring, affirming there is no better way to travel. And he is right too that there is no better place to tour than France.