Travel writer Simon Parker gives thoughts on Yorkshire after completing 3,000 mile cycling journey around Britain

At the age of 19, Simon Parker did just that, the persuasive spirit for adventure embedded within his bones. He spent the best part of 18 months hitch-hiking around Australia and New Zealand, a tent, camping stove and fishing rod about all that he had to his name.

That all set the wheels in motion for a life of exploration and a career as a travel writer and broadcast journalist that by the age of 34 has seen him report from more than 100 countries, paraglide solo through the Andes, hike up Bali’s highest volcanoes and drive a rickshaw the length of India. A pretty impressive portfolio.

“It’s no fluke that I’m now a travel writer,” Parker muses. “I spent most of my teenage years poring over maps and atlases and looking at globes, studying far away countries. This was the job that I always dreamt of doing.”

At the start of 2020, Parker had reached what he describes as his peak, securing an exclusive interview with Roger Federer, one of the greatest tennis players of all time, whilst in Cape Town, South Africa.

“In March 2020, it really felt like my career was riding the crest of a wave. I’d worked so hard for 10 or 15 years to get to this point and I think the pinnacle [was that]. A couple of weeks later the world went mental and everything just fell apart.”

He is, of course, talking about the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. He lost a year’s worth of work, leaving him with no choice but to live on his savings, and he and his partner struggled to afford to pay their mortgage. “My career almost vanished overnight because we couldn’t travel,” he says, “and a travel writer who can’t travel is unemployed.”

The struggle was compounded by the sudden passing of an old school friend, who had died in his sleep. Parker fell into a spiral of depression and anxiety. Breathless, palpitations and insomnia became a norm that he struggled to escape, not helped by the stifling of his usual adventurous release.

“I thought I have to try to rescue myself somehow, do something to try to wrestle myself out of this depression I found myself in,” he recalls. “I knew travel, exercise, adventure had been things that had served me well before.”

And so he hatched a plan. He would cycle around Britain, his motivation three-fold - pay his bills, satisfy his quench for travel, and bring a much-needed boost to his mental health.

The journey, split into two legs in 2020 and 2021, took him 3,427 miles around pandemic Britain, across 55 counties and to the farthest corners of the country. It is now the subject of both a national theatre tour and a book for Parker, both of which he has called Riding Out.

Parker, who is from Oxfordshire, set off on his bike from the northernmost point of Shetland in October 2020, spending time on the road until November that year.

His second leg, which took place for around six weeks from May 2021, took him through Yorkshire, where he experienced some of biggest highs and also his toughest low of the journey- navigating the North York Moors National Park in a heatwave with broken gears.

“It was some of the most challenging cycling I’ve experienced anywhere in the world,” he says. “I had to limp through the moors with one gear and it was horrible combined with all the hills and the heatwave. The North York Moors felt positively martian that day, very arid and hot.”

His journey along the Yorkshire coastline was a more positive experience. “It was easily one of the most beautiful places I went on my whole journey, utterly stunning,” he says. “If I’m totally honest it was the part of Britain I knew the least and I was so overwhelmed with just how wild and how open it felt.”

On his route, Parker met hundreds of inspiring and resilient Britons who were all who were all, in their own way, riding out the storm as he was, drawing strength from their situations and finding hope in the darkness. He hoped chatting to them would give him a blueprint to help him deal with challenging situations in the future.

“The trip gave me an opportunity to digest the fractious events we were facing,” he says. “It made me feel alive, rather than simply surviving. I learned so much from so many people, and I’m looking forward to sharing those lessons with audiences this year.”

In Scarborough, Parker had one of his most memorable encounters of the journey, when he met a man who was metal detecting on the beach. “He told me that his wife had died a couple of years before and he felt lost with the position he found himself in so he decided to set off on this big journey around Britain with his metal detector.

“He was making about seven or eight hundred pounds a month which he could survive on just in 50ps and 20ps. I loved that story. I went off on my bicycle and had found this way of coping and he had found this thing he loved, being out with his metal detector and it was his lifeline through a very tough time.”

For Parker, who began a career in journalism after returning to finish his English degree following his trip to Australia and New Zealand, the cycling challenge was a chance to connect with landscapes closer to home.

As well as completing mammoth feats such as sailing and cycling from China to London and hiking every known route to Machu Picchu, Parker has reported on topics including product shortages in Venezuela, the ‘migrant crisis’ in Greece, social inequality in the barrios of Northern Colombia and climate change in the high Andes and Svalbard.

But this journey helped him not only as a travel writer, but also just as a Briton, to build up a picture of “how diverse, interesting and beautiful this country is” too.

“What this journey proved to me is that I can have a big worthwhile interesting adventure on my own doorstep,” he says. “I don’t have to fly to the other side of the planet to do it.”

Both the tour and the book chart Parker’s remarkable journey of how he battled grief and anxiety one pedal stroke at a time. The tour will visit more than 50 venues across the UK and recreate the epic journey through a series of intimate anecdotes, short films, exclusive footage, photos and audio clips. The talk will be followed by a Q&A and his new book will be available to purchase.

“During that first part of the pandemic it honestly felt like I lost everything and I had to go off on a journey to try to come to terms with how much my life had changed,” Parker says. “I dare not think what might have happened to me if I hadn’t gone out and experienced the thrill of travel and adventure on home shores.”

Riding Out: A Journey of Love, Loss and New Beginnings is published April 21. The Riding Out tour is at Beverley East Riding Theatre on March 30, Helmsley Arts Centre on September 16 and Otley Courthouse on September 23. Visit simonwparker.co.uk

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