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 …
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 …
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 …
We’ve realised that Gdansk/Danzig is going to be a bit of a stretch, so today, just into Poland along the Baltic coast (see maps below), we’ve turned south towards Szczecin, where we’ll park Daisy and do a two-day train trip to and back from the city that gave birth in 1980 to Solidarity and ultimately … Read more …
It was very good to pause in Hamburg, to see the city writ both large/real and small/model in Wunderland, to cruise the container port and to hear the fabulous Tallis Scholars live in the stunning, overwhelming, brilliant Elbe Philharmonic. Let the following, however, just be an excuse for some hopefully inspiring photographs, with our impresive … Read more …
With just short of three weeks tandeming behind us on our 12-week jaunt through Northern Europe, we’re settling into a pretty solid routine of about 70km a day, regardless it seems of how early we start or how far we intend to travel – feeling a bit guilty about the electrics, but it really does … Read more …
Hamlin of ratcatching fame from the Brothers Grimm fairy tales has to be one of Germany’s prettiest old towns – and there’s a lot of competition. Hamlin – Hameln in German – is quietly understated, but beautifully preserved and proud of the 1284 story which history suggests was probably to do with local youngsters being … Read more …
Germany certainly doesn’t do food by halves. The portions here at the Westfaelischer Hof in Luegde (2 x 70km days, and moral of the story is don’t expect to camp if arriving after six…) are gigantic, and delicious. Huntsman’s Schnitzel for Jutta and mine overbaked with cheese and mushrooms. Subtle they ain’t, but talk about … Read more …
Saturday May 6, Coronation Day back home, finds us in Lippstadt in the German Sauerland just short of Bielefeld, having visited (for the second time on our tandem) the Moehne dam of Dambusters memory in 1943. For Germany, even though at least 1500 people died, mostly forced labourers from then Nazi-occupied territories to the East … Read more …
For this post, rather than writing a whole load of text, let the images tell the story. I ‘ll try to position in them in the right order, so for our tandem journey Tuesday May 2-Wednesday May 3, follow the pictures and the captions, and we’ll hope to raise a smile. Read more …