We are Andrew and Margaret, and for a considerable part of our lives we have been travelling — seriously, often for extended periods, and a great deal of it by bicycle. Great Wide Open is where we put that experience to use: practical guides to the destinations we know well, and honest accounts of what it actually felt like to be there.
The name is a nod to Tom Petty. It captures something that keeps us going back — that moment when you step into the unfamiliar and realise just how large the world is. A viewpoint you almost skipped. A city you had never heard of until you cycled into it. A place you thought you knew, revealing something entirely new. We have had many of those moments, and we are always looking for more.
Who We Are
Between us, we have travelled extensively through Australasia, Hong Kong, Spain, and the wider reaches of Europe, the USA, and Canada — usually for weeks or months at a time rather than quick fly-in-fly-out visits. A significant part of that travel has been by bike. We have covered thousands of kilometres under our own steam, through cities, countryside, and places well beyond the tourist circuit. Travelling slowly gives you a different relationship with a destination: more accidental encounters, more time to notice things, and a much better sense of how a place actually works.
We have done the organised tour and the famous sights. We have also spent long evenings getting lost in the wrong neighbourhood, discovered that the guidebook’s top recommendation closed two years ago, and learned which advice to trust and which to ignore. That accumulated experience is what we are trying to pass on here.
What You Will Find Here
Great Wide Open has three distinct types of content, each doing a different job.
The destination guides are practical and researched — city pages, country hubs, and specific attractions, written the way we wish travel guides were always written: useful, specific, and without the filler. Use these when you are planning where to go and what to do when you get there.
The Experiences part of this site is a curated collection of articles that tell you about our favourite activities and experiences — a railway journey, a ferry ride, a cycle ride. We’ve provided practical detail to help you decide whether to do the same.
The blog is the unfiltered record: posts written during our journeys as they happened, day by day. Not polished retrospectives — the real thing, including the bits that didn’t go to plan.
The guide tells you what to expect. The experiences tell you what we made of it. The blog tells you what it was actually like on a Tuesday.
A Note on Credibility
Most of our destination content is grounded in places we know well and have returned to repeatedly: Australia, New Zealand, Spain, and Hong Kong, with more to come. Where we write about destinations we know less directly — or where we are drawing on research and reliable sources rather than personal experience — we say so clearly. We think that is simply the honest thing to do.
Travel changes quickly. Prices shift, businesses close, and the brilliant restaurant someone recommended will occasionally turn out to be a car park. We do our best to keep our information current, but treat it as a well-informed starting point rather than the final word.
Get In Touch
The comments on each page are always open — if something we have written prompts a question or reminds you of somewhere you have been, that is the right place to leave it. For anything more direct — a correction, a suggestion, a question you would rather not ask publicly — the contact page is the place to go. We read everything and reply when we can.