The surest way to know if you love someone or hate them is to travel with them.
If you really want to know what someone’s like, there’s no better way to find out than to go on a journey with them. Preferably a long, slow journey, one that requires you to work together to reach a shared goal. Mark Twain, in Tom Sawyer Abroad, put it like this: “There ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”
For Catherine Pringle, the protagonist in Peloton of Two, the stakes are higher than just friendship. She needs to know if the man she’s with is her soulmate. So, in a moment of madness, she decides that the best way to find out is to spend an entire summer with him in France on a tandem. A three-month Tour de France, just the two of them for more than 4,000 kilometres, with no one looking on except the readers of Catherine’s tell-all newspaper column.
But things never go according to plan on any journey. Just ask Ernest Hemingway, who wrote in A Moveable Feast about a trip he made with F Scott Fitzgerald. It was a disaster, and it led him to conclude: “Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.”
That’s the risk you take when you travel with someone. Catherine Pringle knows it’s risky, but travelling alone will tell her nothing.
You can always ride alone, and for many people I’m sure this is the ideal. A bicycle, and the feeling of moving at your own pace through an interesting and challenging landscape, are perfect companions for a solo traveller. The sense of movement, the rhythm and cadence of the turning cranks, the little mechanical sounds from the cycle – all of these wrap you in a comfortable, pleasant bubble.
And that could well be enough for most of us. But for some, and I count myself among them, the missing dimension is a cycling partner to share it with. It’s risky riding with someone else – it could be a joyful experience or an utter trial. Sometimes the same partner might bring both emotions with them …
Catherine knows she’d rather be in a peloton of two, but only time will tell if it’s going to work. For her, the surest way to know if you love someone or hate them is to travel with them … on a tandem.