As Ralph McTell (and I, in my late 60s/early 70s folk-singing Uni days) used to put it, finally the moment has come and here we stand, as Jutta and I (fresh from our winter break in Grenada, revisiting where we honeymooned in 1997) are very shortly off on our VERY-long-planned cycling sabbatical around Europe.

Daughter Katharine will be minding the shop here in Sheringham while we pedal off on Daisy2 via Hoek van Holland next week, whence through North Germany all the way to Gdansk in Poland (just short of Kaliningrad through which we cycled in 2017), and then back home through Germany South and West.

Scroll on down for some more photos, a taste of how we’ll be blogging (a bit) as we go, shedding cobwebs from a lot of hard EMDR work over the past decade, and particularly since 2016 when we tandemed (I often wonder whether that might be written tandemned, or tendamned perhaps?) the length of New Zealand.

Daisy2 has now been upgraded with a Pendix electric motor, which we already love, and we’re adding a Bob Yak trailer off the back for our camping gear – knowing that while it’s nice to use Warmshowers, Air BnB or Booking.com for overnighting, there will be many occasions when the tent and sleeping bags will be life-savers.

There are crazy amounts of things I’d like to, and may, blog and write about: the at times breathtaking power of attachment-informed EMDR to change lives; the joy of the two of us getting our marriage right nearly 50 years in now (having tried of course all the alternatives); the speed of climate change and civilisational breakdown that’s about to hit us (this will feature prominently…).

But hating writing as I do (has a lot, I think, to do with both being Aspergers/Autistic and also constantly pressured in early childhood always to Be Doing Something Else More Productive), I’ll use this blog to tell our travel story mainly through photographs.

To which end, here’s already experimenting with how that might be done on this cyclotherapist/psychlotherapist blog, smiling as I do how many well-meaning friends and colleagues point out how I’ve misspelled psychotherapist, with that errant L.

Which, being both a psychotherapist and a cyclist, is of course the point.

In the spirit of my relationship with writing, and channelling Prince Harry (for whom I have a lot of time), I’ve commissioned a lovely ghost writer to do me (while J & I pedal) an autobiography of my crazy life (at least some of it documented here, including radio features from the old days), and also to update my AI-EMDR handbook with case studies and much more comprehensive musing about why and how this works.

The photos below have been chosen to illustrate some of the key mechanical stories behind how Daisy2 now works, with electro-motor and also solid saddles.

So (never start a paragraph with So…) hoping that friends and folk might in the coming weeks find this blog entertaining and perhaps even informative, here goes – and please do comment and share as you feel might be appropriate.