Coeliac biker, finding somewhere to eat on the road nearly broke me UK & Ire
I've been coeliacsince 2017, and I ride. Anyone who does both knows the specific hell I'm about to describe.
You're 40 miles into a ride, you're hungry, and you pull over in some village you've never been to. Everyone else just walks into the nearest pub. Me? I'm stood outside googling "gluten free near me," reading menus through the window, ringing ahead to ask if they understand cross-contamination, and half the time giving up and eating a bag of crips in a car park because it's not worth the risk.
I did the NC500 (Scotland) on my bike, genuinely one of the best trips of my life, and some of my strongest memories are of being absolutely starving (in the loose terms) because there was nowhere I could safely eat for miles. On what should've been the trip of a lifetime.
ireland was similar, Wales was pretty good..
And it made me angry. Not sad, angry. Because the information exists, other coeliacs have been to these places, they know which ones are brilliant, it's just locked in their heads or buried in FB posts / threads or Insta that vanish. There was no way to be that bit more spontanios, when you're actually stood there, hungry, deciding.
So I'm curious, fellow coeliacs (bikers or not)
how do you handle eating out somewhere new? What's your system? Do you plan every stop in advance, or wing it and hope? I feel like we've all just quietly accepted this as normal and I'm not sure we should have.