Tim Dowling: I’m on an ebiking holiday in Romania. There will be blood

I’m on a plane, in the middle seat between my wife – on the aisle – and a stranger who is occupied on her phone. My wife, a nervous flyer, is in a restless mood; she snatches my laptop and begins typing. At the bottom of the screen, under the half-completed article I’m working on, she has written: “The lady next to you is a horse-loving Democrat – I know this by watching her Insta feed.” The next morning we find ourselves in a Romanian village, examining our assigned bicycles.

We are one of six couples on the trip, intending to cover between 25 and 35 miles a day, across fields and forests, in weather predicted to be somewhere between changeable and ominous. I should point out that the bikes are electric; the jolt of power that drives the bike forward as soon as I turn the pedals is like riding a fractious pony.

We spend an hour looking at a Saxon church before cycling out on a rutted and potholed road, then turning on to a gravel track that heads steeply uphill and plunges into woods.

Romania

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