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 …
We’ve been taking a one-day break in Wackershofen, deepest SW Germany, with Annette and Robert, the former once leading soprano in the East Berlin Cathedral Choir where we sang 1977-81. That’s them on the left/above, with formidable breakfast lined up in the kitchen (originally a stable) of their beautiful 400-year-old half-timbered home just outside Schwäbisch … Read more …
I’ve cycled this stretch of the Rhine (Basel to Schaffhausen along the German/Swiss border) twice already, once on a solo in 2008 West to East on my way to Budapest and back, and then on Daisy 2 with previous stoker from West to East 2011. So it was very weird with Jutta today, heading West, … Read more …
Look closely in the photo above, and you’ll see fairytale Neuschwanstein, model for all those Disney cartoon castles, less than a day short of Daisy’s current destination, brother/brother-in-law in the deepest, brightest, greenest Alpine foothills of Bavaria. Two months in and with a month to go till we’re home, this is the furthest away from … Read more …
If one picture is worth a thousand words, this post is a very, very long one… Last reported from Leipzig, we’re now a week-plus further into our tandem journey around Germany, eight-and-a-half weeks in and just outside Jutta’s birthplace and home for her first 15 years, Vilsbiburg (about 75km north-east of Munich.) The ride has … Read more …
With thanks to Heide and Juergen, VERY old friends from student days in Leipzig 52 years ago, for use of their flat here for the last three nights (they’re in Sweden marking their own 53rd wedding anniversary), we’ve had a brief rest from cycling, half way through our three months on the road, to overload … Read more …
From contradictory Weimar, home to Germany’s greatest writer Goethe, this wonderful country’s doomed effort at post-WWI parliamentary democracy, and, yes, the horror of Buchenwald concentration camp, the briefest of posts (wordcount-wise) with pictures to capture Daisy’s progress through week seven of our three-month journey. First, a map to summarise the last few days from Berlin … Read more …