3. Along the Elbe
Germany has some big rivers which are very popular with cyclists. We’ve cycled the Rhine and parts of the Mosel but the Elbe is much less popular and more remote so we decided to try that next. It’s another huge river with commercial traffic even though we didn’t see any, but it has cycle paths adjacent to it. It’s flat, picturesque and quiet. The river meanders like a river should, winding back and forth untamed by humans and has beaches and mud flats. For most of it you are entirely on your own, with no other cyclists and just the noise of your tyres on the path and...
Read More2. The Devils Day
Leaving our second home in Naarden we took a short cycle back to the hotel where we’d recently spent our anniversary at Amersfoort, successfully missing the thunderstorms until we could actually see the hotel across the road and getting drenched in the 300m before we could get to it. The rain now is tropical not just showers, great deluges for 15 minutes then gone. Who needs Thailand, but on the bright side we were offered a free glass of bubbly on arrival – should have been cocoa – and postponed that until we had got changed and dry and sat by the fire to enjoy it....
Read More1. A Catalogue of Catastrophes
It’s not often Ten Tonne Taffy gets a mentioned in dispatches these days, but lately she’s had a rough time, doing nothing but being our home. Firstly, I got up one night to go to the loo, one of the joys of getting older, and smelt that plasticky electric burning smell. I switched off the power and went back to bed after checking nothing was on fire and the next day took the fuse board cover off and found that the immersion wire had burned completely through and melted some other wires and fuses. A close call! A close call… It turns out that the screw for that wire...
Read MoreFall in you ‘orrible lot!
Our ten days with the Du Randts was eventful and great fun, Jacques and Mandy are early birds and we’re more likely to be thinking about a cup of tea from the comfort of our sleeping bags by the time they’re stopping for their first cuppa of the day whilst cycling. So we had to make an effort and get up, get packed and ready to go by 9am daily, which after some negotiation (us whinging) was relaxed to 9:15. He’s a hard task master that Jacques! Anyway, we set off in the direction of Strasbourg stopping at a lovely fortified walled French town for lunch. He was breaking us...
Read MoreA spoke In the works….
And on the third day the rain stopped, (well it had been biblical like). So we set off towards Basle. Our aim for the day was to reach a remote campsite on the Rhine, far from any town and we thought obviously going to be quiet. We’d stopped en route at the Rhine Falls for a quick walk around at the immense water fall and got to our campsite after a 65km cycle through some gorgeous villages and towns in Switzerland and Germany and were quite tired when we arrived at 6pm. The campsite was heaving and there was already a party in full swing with teenagers being teenagers, which is fine...
Read MoreIt’s raining again…
The camping had gone quite well and we set off in bright sunshine toward Lake Constance. The wind was behind us and we made good time, which was just as well as behind us clouds started to grow and soon we had our jackets on to keep us warm as the sun was overtaken by them. We crossed into Litchenstein, then into Austria – stopping off a cup of coffee and a cake that didn’t require a down payment and 5 monthly installments to follow, and then back into Switzerland, probably the most expensive country in the world. We saw a car get a parking ticket £360. Two coffees £10 and a camp...
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