Faced with the threat of a climate emergency, some people are recycling more or turning their central heating thermostats down a bit. Daniel Rayneau-Kirkhope and Arianna Casiraghi crossed Europe on his GPS bike, which is 600 miles (600 miles) wide. with my dog.
The couple gave up their jobs as physicists and embarked on a 4,500-mile (approximately 4,500 miles) bicycle trip through seven countries. This route was carefully planned to delineate the giant bike that traverses the continent.
Speaking to The Guardian from Switzerland on their way back to their home in Piedmont, northern Italy, the British-Italian pair drew attention to the scale of climate change and persuaded people to think about using bicycles instead of cars. A shorter trip.
The trip earned three somewhat niche world records. The largest GPS drawing ever made, the largest such image drawn of cycling alone and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the largest bicycle ever drawn.
The actual cycling took about four months overall, but it was a much longer quest. From the summer of 2019, the team had to be out of action after 40-year-old Casiraghi picked up a knee injury. A return to the route that had to be canceled in November as it was too cold to camp. Plans for completion in March 2020 have since been scrapped by Covid.
“Being able to see it on the map is mostly a relief,” Casiraghi said. “We had so many obstacles. We felt like we let people down by not finishing it, and our lives felt like a dead end. So we’re very happy.”
Rayneau-Kirkhope, 35, assembled the bike himself for this trip. One of them has a cargo section in the front that he can travel with the Italian water dog Zola.
“She loved the cargo bike. She happily gets on and off and makes it clear when she wants to walk,” he said. “She tried to run on narrow roads and off-road as much as possible so Zola could walk a little bit.”
Planning the perfect bike across France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland was no easy task. Casiraghi’s first attempt was to place a drawing on a map directly through his Gaulle airport outside Paris, Charles de Charles.
Luckily, the images are so large that it was unlikely that we would detour a few miles to find a quiet road. It was drawn in a virtually continuous line, only turned off when entering and exiting and forced to make a 30-mile detour.
The final virtual drawing is huge, the couple estimates it’s about 600 miles long, and it’s clearly a bicycle.
“If people see this image, the message we want to convey is: Remember that you might have your bike somewhere. For short trips, you should use your car, not your car.” I wish I could use my bike a little more,” said Casiraghi, who met her husband while he was completing his PhD in Nottingham. “At least think about using a bicycle. It’s fun, it’s great, it’s cheap and it’s healthy.”
