The initial idea of a summer cycling tour began a few years ago but never developed into a full plan. We knew we wanted to do it and that was enough. Then, last Christmas we started to discuss it more and dithered between two ideas: 1. Cycle the Baltic Sea. 2. Head into France and meander south. Idea 1 had…
Tag: Baltic Sea Cycle Tour
We entered France at Lille and what felt like the worlds longest continuous highstreet. It went on, and on, and on. We spent so long on it that it started to feel like a timeloop. Every 10 minutes the same tram station would go past, and I would stare at it until I realised that it was ever so slightly…
I was initially excited about cycling through Belgium. I researched the best way home during the Dusseldorf break and found the Flanders Cycle Route. It’s a segment of LF6 that goes from Maastricht to near Dunkirk and so would have carried us nearly all the way back. In reality, it was useless and we ended up going more diagonally towards…
We approached Germany with some apprehension, everyone knows the German reputation for being strict and law-abiding so we thought they probably wouldn’t be so thrilled to find us camped in the corner of a graveyard or on their pristine football pitch. Our worries turned out to be unfounded as we made it across to Dusseldorf without any incomprehensible yelling matches…
Our final day of cycling in Lithuania ended with being interrogated by the Lithuania/Kaliningrad Border Police, so it was only natural that we hopped over the border when the road did pass near it for a few miles. The nearest guard tower was 5 miles away and the Russian side was wild woodland so it was a pretty safe way…
Lithuania was my least favourite of the Baltic States, that isn’t to say that we didn’t have plenty of fun though. We lost equipment and found it again, got waylaid by a super-social German and questioned by the border guard. Our second day in Lithuania was an unusually long one. Leaving the campsite at 9am and cycling until 7pm in…
The first part of the Latvian disaster is that my brother started to feel ill one morning when we were wild camping without water. He was then sick multiple times, I told him to toughen up and we cycled 45 miles until we found another suitable wild camping spot. He spent the rest of the day languishing in bed. On…
Estonia is our first Baltic state and marks the beginning of the westward journey home. It is one of the most sparsely populated countries in Europe and so we found an abundance of woods to camp in and rarely saw anyone in the evening. I found my first and so far only waterfall of the holiday in Estonia. I’ve found…
The Finnish section of the holiday was short, only spending four nights in the country. We cycled from Turku to Helsinki along the King’s Road, a section of the old major postal route that linked up Norway to Russia in the 14th century. It was 150 miles of mostly forest and wilderness. We were close to the sea but rarely…
A constant thought during the first half of the tour was whether we should go further north in Sweden and up around the Bothnian Sea or cut across to Finland. In Stockholm we decided that we had had enough of endless woods and that sailing through the Archipelago Sea would be more interesting. It consists of 20,000 islands, almost all…