Writing on the Road

Nina Jenkin's father Roy died of cancer when she was eight years old. In 1953, aged 21, he and his student friend Gordon Newbery had undertaken a 2300-mile cyclng trip through France and he kept a diary of their travels which he later worked up into an illustrated travelogue with over 150 pictures and 12 hand-drawn maps. The journey started in Exeter and took in an anticlockwise route down the west coast of France, along the Canal du Midi, up the Rhone valley and the mountains of Vercors to Geneva, then through Switzerland and over the Jura mountains to Basel, crossing Germany through the Black Forest then down the Rhine to Heidelberg. There they turned east for Paris and then north to Le Touquet where they boarded a small plane and crossed the Channel to Lympne before the final leg along the south coast. In total they had been away for almost 6 weeks and spent £16 each! In 1983 Roy died of cancer and 10 years later his widow passed away too. Nina Jenkin took solace in her father's travel journal and as the millennium drew to a close, decided that she would retrace her father's journey and try to rediscover not only the places he visited, but also the families he had met. Accompanied by Simon Rawles, the pair set out exactly 50 years after Roy and Gordon's adventure and, like her father, Nina recorded the trip and maintained a blog of their travels (www.voyagevoyage.com/en/weblog/). Keeping as much to the original route as possible Nina and Simon completed their trip with over 2400 miles under their wheels. Along the way they had managed to not only visit the precise locations (even sleeping in the same sheds!) as their predecessors, but amazingly had made contact with people who remembered Roy and Gordon 50 years before. The journey was not without the stresses and problems of such a major undertaking, especially when relations between Nina and Simon were strained, but the end-result was a life-changing adventure for both of them. Writing on the Road is not only a daughter's moving tribute to her father, it is also an informative and entertaining travel memoir as well.