"You can't be too stressed about cycling around the world, because it's so hard to comprehend how hard it is," Daniel Ainsworth says to me, accompanied by a burst of his contagious laughter. It's a bright, sunny spring day, a rare occurrence for the time of year, and we're walking towards Barlinnie, Scotland's largest prison, in the northeast of Glasgow.
And while the weather invites outdoor activities, we're about to spend the afternoon indoors, inside the thick walls of the Victorian prison, whose hulking brick presence is hard to miss. But we're not there for the prison's history – we're there because of a bike.
As we approach the prison, Ainsworth – or Dan, as I know him – is only weeks from setting off on an around-the-world ride. He is doing so without a support crew, and also without anything one would call a sensible bike for the task. His bike is long, heavy, unusual-looking, and made here, inside Barlinnie. It is difficult to hear that and not immediately arrive at two – if not more – questions: why, and how?
Walking through Barlinnie's dated lobby, signing in, passing through airport-style security with my Tascam recorder in a tray, I keep thinking that this is one of the most unusual cycling stories I've ever reported on. And perhaps part of that is because it's not really just a story about a bicycle, but people.
Dan's story
Dan with his logbook, on the day of his departure.
I had met with Dan a few weeks before the prison visit for a catch-up at a city-centre park – it was the longest conversation I'd had with him since we both worked at a branch of Evans Cycles many years ago. From being colleagues at a bike shop, our career paths had wandered off in different directions, but we both stayed connected, mostly through bikes – and as is common in smaller industries like cycling, we eventually looped back to the same city where we first met. For weeks now, I had seen posts about his around-the-world attempt appear on my Instagram feed, and I wasn't surprised, but I was curious.
I knew that Dan was eager to see the world, but the 'why' part of this adventure is one that only he can explain. To understand it, we have to go back a long way before the visit to Barlinnie and the building of the around-the-world cargo bike.
Did we do a good job with this story?
