With thanks to Priscilla and Rupert for a warm welcome on Ile de Re, where they’re burning their 90-day Brexit you-can-stay-in-the-EU-per-half-year allowance in one go, we’ve trundled 320km+ gently south beyond La Rochelle heading towards Bordeaux. The French remain delightfully welcoming, the weather is behaving itself as are our ancient legs and Daisy2 too, so … Read more …
It was very close to here, near St Nazaire’s Old Mole, that my great uncle Mark Rodier was killed in the early morning of March 3 1942, in what became known as The Greatest Raid of All. The raid did what it was designed to do, disabling the dry dock at St Nazaire, and at … Read more …
Four days in, we’re getting pleasingly back into gear, including already a very wet (dew and fog) night’s camping alongside the canal in Evran. And finding ourselves today barrelling 120km across the base of Brittany mostly on the old railway tracks of the Voie Verte 3, repurposed as one of France’s most beautiful long distance … Read more …
In a slightly jumbled order, some images from days 1 & 2 of our ride now starting through France, most importantly of the German war cemetery near Marigny, where Jutta’s uncle Hans is buried. Hans died on day 11 of Operation Overlord, just a month short of his 18th birthday, his gravestone in the beautiful, … Read more …
With panniers and bags piled up ready to go tomorrow Wednesday, Jutta and I are heading out again for a couple of months, taking our trusty tandem Daisy2, now nearly 20 years old, first to Portsmouth and then all the way round France+N Spain for 4500 km. Or thereabouts. We’ll blog a bit as we … Read more …
For those seriously interested in what a BBC News correspondent based in Beijing recorded and reported during Deng Xiaoping’s pre-Tiananmen years of Jingji Gaige and Dui Wai Kaifang (Economic Reform and Opening Up), here’s a full list of raw cassettes collected during my time in China. The cassettes have all been digitised, and listed in … Read more …
We promised in an earlier blog post to wrap up our tandem tour of Germany with musings from Jutta, so here, a month on from our last-day 100-mile dash to home in Sheringham, is Daisy’s final wrap.. Well, we returned a week earlier than initially booked (12 weeks rather than the full three months) and … Read more …
So, with a dog leg out to the West from Harwich to call in on sister Calla just outside Cambridge, yesterday Monday July 17 saw us setting a final distance record of 170km/106 miles (!) for our 2023 tandem journey around Germany, a second-best-ever since traversing 240km of the GDR in one day 44 years … Read more …
Sitting on the Stena Line ferry at Hoek van Holland ready to leave for Harwich, we’re both a touch tearful at leaving mainland Europe after more than 5000 kilometres on Daisy all around Germany. At 80 days on the continent – 10 short of what I (Mark) am allowed in any 180 period under the … Read more …
Heading rapidly north along the Rhine and posting this from friends near Bonn – 380km these past four days in at times ferocious but just-survivable heat (the beer helps…) – we rather enjoyed visiting the city of Worms, to smile at the double meaning, in English if not in German, of a Diet of the … Read more …