When we decided to do another European "bike-about", several mentioned that they were looking forward to reading more about our trials and tribulations as we peddled about the continent. I had mixed feelings about doing another blog until I recently re-read the one we did last year (LINK), which brought back some great memories. There is something to be said about keeping a travelogue, even if it is for yourself. So, for those of you with nothing better to do, you get to stumble along more bad grammar (but hopefully good pictures) as we do the sequel: "Europe on small wheels - II".
The route this year will be a little different in that we plan to add Germany and Switzerland to our itinerary. We figured we need more varieties of wine, beer, cheese, and languages to our adventure. We will be starting in familiar territory in Holland and head south to our destination in Provence in south of France. Big difference this time will be that there will be more hills and mountains along the route. We know it will be great scenery on one hand, but some challenges to our bodies as we haul fully loaded bicycles up some steep inclines. We don't think that biking over the bridge in Oriental can count as valuable training experience. The good part is that we'll have some flat terrain in the beginning through Holland to warm up on before we run into any hills starting in Germany. We'll have to just have to repeat the saying borrowed from a recently retired German pro cyclist, Jens Voigt, who said: "Shut up legs!", whenever the pain started to set in.
Again, we are going by the mantra: "Have a plan, but improvise as needed". Last year we intended to ride in Provence, but swapped that part of the trip with the Loire valley when the weather prospects in the south of France didn't look promising. This time we plan to ride all the way down to Provence and skip the train "adventures" (we do plan to take a train back to Amsterdam at the end).
Below is an overview of the route we plan to take. Here is a LINK to the route detail should you really want to know the turn-by-turn directions that we may, or may not take. Decided to leave "Eddie" (Merckx), our GPS device, behind and instead rely on the iPhone for directions and maps. I can imagine Eddie had some nice goat trails in mind for us to take in Switzerland...
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| Elevation profile. |
We have close to six weeks to cover the distance (around 1,350 miles) and altitude (80,500 ft of climbing). We plan to take some days off along the way to sniff the lavender, stretch the legs, and explore the local area more. If we don't make it all the way, then so be it..
Planning for the trip this time has been relatively easy since we have most of the stuff that we used last year. Although I did change the gears on our Bike Friday bicycles to give us a few more teeth to tackle the hills. May need to take extra layer of clothing since we can't count on having the same great weather as last time. Oh..... most importantly, Linda has a new bike seat that she loves so far...
We'll try to put out blog posts as often as we can depending on network access and motivation at the end of a long day in the saddle. We arrive in Amsterdam on September 8th and will stay there for two nights before we hit the road with our bikes. The first real trip blog will probably not be posted until September 11.
Stay tuned...
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