Summer 2018 was an adventurous few months. I went backpacking in the Pyrenees and then got home and started my second bicycle tour. This involved loading the bikes onto a plane and flying to Romania, then meandering back to England through Europe. I’ve collected my adventures over the summer into this post with quick links to each country along with…
Back when we were planning where to go on this cycle tour, one of the options we thought of was nipping over the English channel to France and spending a few weeks meandering through the French countryside. In the end we settled on going from Romania to England of course, but I like to think that these last two weeks…
From our hilltop campsite in Germany it was a quick cycle into Schaffhausen, the town famous for Rheinfall. We were amazed by how clear the Rhine was when we first saw it, it was a shock after cycling along the Danube that alternates between murky green and stirred mud where the boats brush the river bed. In comparison, the Rhine…
This post marks the end of cycling the Danube and the short hop south into Switzerland to make the transition onto our next great European river: the Rhine! The most exciting part of the last leg of the Danube was the Danube Gorge. The river enters a narrow, wooded gorge and meanders past huge cliffs. As the evening drew near…
I’ve made a bit of an error with finishing the writeup from my Black Sea bicycle tour last year. I’m finding I have lots of photos but not so many words to go alongside them. Posting as the holiday progresses is a vastly better way of tackling a travel blog. This post is quite long, so I’ve split up the…
The most popular cycling section of the Danube is the stretch from Passau to Vienna. We started it in August and it was the busiest by far. There was a constant stream of cyclists; day trippers, lycra-clad speeders, other independent tourers like us, but also arranged tour cyclists. Austria has multiple companies that sell a bicycle tour rent package, making…
We cycled into Hungary on Sunday 19th August. Unbeknownst to us, the first king of Hungary was canonised on the 20th August 1083. We admired the quiet roads as we cycled along, then arrived at the spot where a ferry should be waiting to carry us across the river and realised it was a little too quiet. We nabbed a…
My first impression of Croatia was ‘wow, that’s a lot of bullet holes’. The Croatian war of independence was fought from 1990 – 1995 and the Croatian/Serbian border was a massive war zone. The scars from the war are still plainly visible in most Croatian border towns, we noticed it especially in Vukovar where there was heavy fighting and a…
When reading about Eurovelo 6 I found that the Romanian section of Eurovelo 6 is often described as “boring”, “arduous” or “repetitive”. So I investigated other options and decided that instead we would meander our way through the Carpathian mountains towards Bran Castle, home of Dracula! We considered catching a train or bus between Tulcea and Braila but the Danube…
The morning we left home was hectic. My brother has been away for 6 weeks and so we only had Saturday to pack up for a 10am departure on Sunday. Luckily you can rely on British trains to be running late and so we managed to catch it with plenty of time to spare. It was then a simple job…