Our European Cycling Adventure 2019

By Johan - It’s always a treat to visit the Netherlands to catch up with family and friends. We are fortunate that we are able to “pop-in” from time to time to keep in touch because although the Internet is great to find out what’s happening, there is nothing quite like a hug, a toast and an evening of face to face banter with the people that are so dear to us. We absolutely loved it and we thank everybody for their amazing hospitality and “gezelligheid” once again.  No surprises here; the biking in the Netherlands is always great; it’s flat and there are cycleways everywhere.  We followed various canals and rivers from the German border near Kerkrade to get to Someren, my old home town.  We were impressed with the European cycleways all the way from Slovenia to Germany and between, however the Dutch put it up another notch. You literally can go just about anywhere using cycleways only. Despite the fact it’s densely populated, there are numerous beautiful scenic cycleways...

Okay we didn’t visit many cities on this piece of the trip. It was through France, Luxemborg, Germany, Belgium and finally Nederland! People don’t speak much about the nature in this part of Europe but its beatiful and easy to bike through. The only hard part is to figure out what language to use. German is your best bet, given most people around the German, French, Luxembourg and Belgium border towns we visited speak German, but also if you speak Dutch or French or English they will happily answer in German 😁. We found an old train track system to ride up the Ardennes and down again WOW! It kind of feels like cheating but during the world wars, Germany laid a lot of train tracks to a lot of places and a lot have been converted to cycle trails.. It has made this part of Europe very easy to travel by bike.  We left the Rhein in France by Breisach to go 8km west to Neuf-Brisach, a fortified town. Pretty awesome place from above (see stock photo above). The fortifications were design...

By Deborah and Johan - We have been everywhere man.... everyday we cross a border at least 3x - somedays it’s hard to know where you are, when. It’s difficult to know who you’re talking to - what their native language is (mostly it’s German, which secretly I have quite an understanding for 🤣🤣) so tonight it happens to be France. The night before Germany and before that we slept in Switzerland because that was convenient! The countryside is always different but very the same. I’ve learnt a lot biking around! Questions arise and haunt you so you track that shit down... I must say Austria was my most challenging ride yet - stiff uphills, sharp downs and not much in between. We did travel one trail made by a Roman guy Claudia Augustus, he contracted to the Roman emperor of the time. Clearly he cut corners because that trail went straight up quite a few times. I have a few words of wisdom for Claudia, starting with ‘switchbacks’... anyway not many cool photos because I was just sweating ...

We are having a rest day in the Alsace region in France, around 80 kms south of Strasbourg after cycling for 6 days through the Rhein river valley from Landeck in Austria.  A good opportunity to briefly talk about the stuff we took on this trip. Not quite as exciting as a travel story and Deborahs travel pics but for those of you that may consider doing something similar it may be of some interest.  We are pretty happy with what we took. As always there is some stuff we could have left behind but generally we used most of it. I guess we went middle of the road; not too heavy but not ultra light. We felt that for a trip this long a bit of extra comfort would be nice.  The Bikes - nothing too fancy, two standard Merida Crossway 500 bikes. We bought these for commuting to work but they are fine for this type of touring too, especially in Europe where most parts for these bikes can be found ok.  At the time we paid approx $1000 NZD per bike  including the back carri...