Celebrating 20 Wonderful Years of Wheel Easy!
After the anniversary club rides on Sunday 7th June, we gathered for a relaxed and sociable afternoon tea at Harrogate Hockey Club. It was a lovely way to round off the day, and with 100 plus members attending the event it was a great way to celebrate together.
Time to Gather
Click/tap any photo to enlarge.
Time to Ride
You can have a look at our anniversary ride reports here
Time for a Tea Party
Time for Malcolm’s Speech
So just over 20 years ago, I had what turned out to be a good idea. I knew there were lots of cycling clubs for serious and hardened cyclists but none, at least in Harrogate, for ‘P-L-U’S’ People Like Us, who didn’t necessarily regard themselves as cyclists but enjoyed going out for a leisurely pedal. So I thought why not try setting one up? The fact we knew next to nothing about cycling didn’t seem to matter. We’d recently retired and had time for something new. We had a family discussion about a name and liked the sound of Harrogate Wheel Easy. And we still do! I put an article in the Harrogate Advertiser inviting readers to join our first ride on 7th May 2006. Lo and behold 35 people turned up and we’ve never looked back since.
By good fortune we were given 2 great contacts. One was Dave Preston, a life long cyclist and stalwart of the Cyclists Touring Club, now Cycling UK, originally founded – in Harrogate – in 1878 as the Bicycle Touring Club. He was pleased to become our first Chair and led our first 10 mile ride. A true gentleman. Sadly, by coincidence, his funeral which some of us attended was on Thursday. The other was a young lady in Harrogate, a web designer who loved the idea of Wheel Easy, and generously designed our first website and club logo free of charge.
Wheel Easy has changed in many ways since that promising start, but it has retained its essential ethos as a club for leisure cycling, appealing to and catering for both very capable cyclists, relative beginners and those who are, dare I say, not as young as they used to be.
Thank you so very much all of you and many others who have enjoyed being part of Wheel Easy, and have contributed in so many different ways – as members of the committee, leading and backmarking rides, writing ride reports, producing newsletters, updating our wonderful website, adding to our unique list of hundreds of routes, organising away days and Wheel Easy holidays and multi day trips such as those Gia and I have hugely enjoyed, to Edinburgh, Scarborough, to Lancashire, round Morecambe Bay -boy did it rain!, from London Kings Cross to Lincoln then the train home, the fabulous coast to coast from Whitehaven to Sunderland, and more. Without you Wheel Easy would not have endured, developed and thrived. I won’t mention specific names except that I do want to thank Gia for 50 years of constant support and encouragement, not least on our various cycling and environmental campaigns and projects. Quite often, not always, the initial ideas have been, or used to be, mine, but when it comes to detail and strategy she’s way ahead.
We’ve learned that to make a worthwhile difference you don’t need to be an expert, you need ambitions that make sense, have wide appeal, and bags of stamina. Unfortunately my stamina ran out a while ago but thankfully Gia still has hers. I hope that will continue, and that Wheel Easy will continue to go from strength to strength. Who knows? Perhaps in 10 years time you can ‘wheel’ me out to make another speech!
