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 …
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 …
With thanks to Szymon, our wonderful host (with partner Kamila) in Szczecin, Poland, for the above shot of Daisy’s 80-kg (or so) road train in focused forward mode, we start our sixth week on the road with 310 km pedalled over the last three days (50 of those without battery!), well over 2000km in total … Read more …
We’re on the train back to Szczecin from two nights in Gdansk, so herewith some musings on cycling Poland, Russia/Cold War memories (40+ years since we were both last here) and Putin/Ukraine (I think this is crunch time for Russia). There are as usual pictures at the bottom of this post (with captions hopefully explaining … 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 …