Frank Gardner’s remarkable family cycling holiday.
Tuscany. Sun-drenched fields scented with lavender, rolling turquoise hills and long, balmy evenings drinking local wines with names you can never remember. ‘A great place to cycle with all the family,’ I was told.
Tremendous, apart from the fact that I haven’t cycled for five years, since a terrorist attack in the Middle East left my legs partly paralysed and me stuck in a wheelchair.
It’s taken me all this time to get round to buying a ‘hand cycle’, a nifty contraption that clips on to the front of my wheelchair. Powered by my arms instead of my legs, with an optional boost from a battery-powered motor for hills, it turns the wheelchair into an instant off-road tricycle.