It feels like a lifetime since we were able to go on new adventures.

Although there is light at the end of the tunnel in terms of the lockdown measures here in the UK, it’s been a real struggle since Christmas. It’s been almost a year since we entered into the first lockdown, but the lockdown we are in now has been far more challenging than those before it.

Although children in England went back to school on Monday, the first step in our roadmap out of lockdown, there are still travel restrictions in place which means we are unable to travel far from home.

However, this didn’t stop us from heading into London, which is about a 20 minute drive from us, and hiring a couple of Boris bikes for the afternoon (they’re now Santander cycles, but I think they will forever be known as Boris bikes. They were first introduced by our now Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, when he was Major of London).

We’d been talking for some time about finding somewhere to hire bikes, but we were struggling to find cycle hire places locally and Santander Cycles don’t come out as far as Kingston.

Although I used to love cycling when I was younger, since moving to London, I’ve been too terrified to get on a bike on the busy city roads.

Thankfully we were able to find a cycle station just a short cycle from The Thames Path, so for most of our bike ride we were well away from the traffic.

We picked up the Thames Path in Wandsworth and headed East towards Battersea Park.

For anyone who hasn’t used the cycle docking stations before, they are super easy to use. You simply enter how many bikes you would like to hire, and then tap your payment card. The first half hour is free, and then after that you pay £2 per half hour. Once you’ve made your purchase, you receive a ticket with a code printed on it. You then just enter the code into the bike’s docking station and it releases the bike for you. Your card won’t be charged until you return the bike to a docking station (and the bonus is it doesn’t need to be returned to the same docking station allowing for one-way trips as well as return trips).

Once we arrived at Battersea Park, we cycled around the edge of the park, before heading back the way we had come and returning our bikes to their docking stations.

Other than literally cycling through the four seasons, it was such a fun afternoon. We cycled through hail, wind, rain and glorious sunshine, but it just felt so freeing to be out and about and doing something different.

I can’t wait for us to get our freedom back so we can start visiting new places again, seeking new adventures, and making new memories.