Thursday September 3rd - Borders

I was woken at some unknown time in the middle of the night by wind and rain beating the outside of the tent. I snuggled down into my sleeping bag, glad that it was still dark and therefore I didn't have to get up yet - there was a chance the weather would improve by morning.

It was still grey and a bit rainy when I woke again at six - and packed very slowly, waiting in the tent and hoping things would brighten up a bit. Breakfast was bread and butter - on previous trips I would make porridge each morning while packing up but, despite carrying stove and fuel, I was yet to actually cook anything this time round. I'd spent the last couple of days getting hot food in cafes at lunchtime and eating picnic-style dinners, in the hope that this would be a great idea and I wouldn't have to endure my horrible camp cooking ever again.

I finally left at about half past eight during a dry spell.

I was nearing the narrow southern tip of the Netherlands now, and crossed briefly in and out of Belgium during the course of the morning. It was while in Belgium that I spotted a bakery and, enticed by its delicious smell, pulled over and noticed a bread vending machine outside (empty, presumably because they were open). I am all for vending machines that sell things other than the usual chocolatey / fizzy rubbish. My personal favourite was an inner tube vending machine in Austria, but I was pretty pleased to find bread available at all hours. Rock on Belgium!

The Netherlands is only a few miles wide at that point and, after crossing back from Belgium, it wasn't long before I was close to the German border. I didn't manage to actually find the border, but stopped for lunch at a coffee house nearby. Another habit I was getting into was hot chocolate. I don't usually drink it, all that hot liquid sugariness goes straight to my head and I get the whole sugar high / crash / headache thing - but hot liquid sugariness is just perfect half way through a day's cycling under a damp cloudy sky.

Further south I entered the sprawling urban landscapes of Sittard / Geleen, two cities which failed to capture my imagination with what I saw of them - but the weather was deteriorating by that point, and very few cities actually look good in the rain.

I saw my first hill on the way out of Geleen, and climbed my first shortly after that, although they were still only tiny hills by pretty much any other country's standards.

Finally I got back into the countryside and spotted a left turn to Valkenburg. I wanted to go to Valkenburg but the route looked to be in the wrong direction so there was some hesitation and checking of maps and compasses before deciding that a break from traffic would be a good idea, and hurtling off down the stony track between cornfields, the wind on my back for a change. The route didn't last long but it was the highlight of my day!

I soon found myself back on the road, beside some roadworks, with no idea where I was or where to go. The wind had really picked up and was making it very hard to use the map (OK, GPS wins a point there). I wasn't sure whether I should be heading off down the newly laid cycle path that ran through the roadworks - the signs were confusing - but I eventually did when I saw some other bloke do it. It turned out to be roughly in the right direction and I was soon at Valkenburg.

Valkenburg turned out to be a pretty (and quite touristy) town with an old castle and city walls, and the town campsite was quite pleasantly situated on a hill overlooking the castle ruins. I was finding Dutch camping prices to be particularly high, and this was no exception - 17.50 euro for the night (I'd normally consider £10 expensive). Since there were lots of places to eat in town I went for a beer and schnitzel. It may not be cheap in the Netherlands but the portions are usually of a good size and they know how to lay on the carbs - my schnitzel came with both chips and rice!

Distance: 50 miles (166 miles so far) • Day 3 Route • Day 3 Photos

Wednesday September 2nd: Perfect Pancakes

On Wednesday I set off into sunshine, with lovely straight, wide, smooth cycle paths running down each side of the road.

I started to rely more on the compass than on maps and signs, and it did me well.

I arrived in Eindhoven at about 4pm and started hunting down Cool Blue, aka gpsshop, to pick up an iGotu GT-200.

The GT-200 is a small GPS logging device which can also double up as an external Bluetooth GPS receiver for a phone. I'm not a big fan of navigating by GPS - I don't need the extra battery drain and like using paper maps. But I liked the idea of having this little device quietly logging my journey - it's often hard to remember the precise route when I get home and want to draw a map of the trip (even more so in places like the Netherlands in which I often don't even know my location at the time). And, should I get truly lost, it would be a handy replacement for the Nokia built-in GPS receiver which is really quite pants. (Unfortunately, on this trip I don't think I ever managed to give the GT-200 quite enough charge to start working and remained clueless as to the meanings of all the different LED combinations until I got home).

South of Eindhoven, the flat farmland faded away into gently sloping pine forests.

Close to Leende I stopped at a junction, unsure of which way to go. Dedicated cycle paths headed both left and right through the woods. Should I go left towards Heeze, where a campsite was marked on my map? Or go right, i.e. south east, the direction I am generally headed in, and find another campsite a little further down? While weighing up this decision I noticed the third option and the only one that really mattered - the sign pointing straight on towards a pannenkoekenhuis (pancake house).

Pannenkoekenhuis De Clown is the kind of place I can get on with - or would consider giving it all up and camping next to for the rest of my life. They offer one hundred and ninety different varieties of delicious tasty pancake. I ordered chocolate and banana and was not disappointed.

I am very impressed with the Dutch dedication to pancakes, as am I with the embeddedness of the banana. A lady sitting nearby had a pancake topped with strawberries and fresh cream which also looked fantastic.

Stuffed full of chocolatey banana-y goodness I waddled out of De Clown and got back on my bike. With a little directional help from a cafe owner further down the road I located a small farm campsite close to Leende, where I also found an abundance of mains sockets in the washroom. I hadn't been able to gather a lot of sunshine with the Solio over the past two days so it was good to be able to charge it overnight.

Distance: 54 miles (116 miles so far) • Day 2 Route • Day 2 Photos

Tuesday September 1st: South Holland and Biesbosch

The boat was due to arrive at 7:45 but I'd forgotten the time zone change so, what with the wake up call being an hour before arrival, I was effectively up at 5:45am. Ouch.

Fortunately the weather smiled upon us as we arrived at Hook of Holland and I cycled off into a beautiful sunny morning, which cast the industrial lands around Rotterdam in a far more flattering light than the last time I visited.

It was good to be back on Dutch cycle paths and the signposts guided me easily along the waterfront past wind turbines, docks and factories. Before long I was feeling thoroughly spoiled to have such lovely paths to ride on. Having right of way when crossing side roads, not having the path come to an abrupt end half way along a busy trunk road... those are things that I could quite happily get used to, but had better not - the UK is a long way off from this.

Dutch cycle paths aren't perfect of course - on our previous trip we got lost quite a lot and often encountered some quite bumpy surfaces. The roads and cycle paths were being dug up in Vlaardingen, and with no sign of any diversion being signposted it came down to common sense and a compass (And a bit of Google maps). Just before I reached Rotterdam, the path turned into a huge sandpit, forcing me to get off and push for a couple of hundred metres.

Just before Dordrecht I had to cross the Oude Maas river, which at that point is spanned by lifting road and rail bridges. The bridges were opening to let boats through when I arrived. The road bridge lifted Tower Bridge style, whereas the rail section was a vertical lift bridge, and it was quite remarkable to watch the two operating side by side. (Photos of the rail bridge under construction)

It had been raining lightly since mid-morning and I stopped in Dordrecht for some shelter and a cheesy pancake. I popped into a book shop to consider getting some proper maps of the cycle paths but at 8 euros each and not covering a huge area, it seemed a bit expensive so I didn't. (I was carrying the same two maps we used in 2006 - a Michelin 1:400K that shows no cycle routes at all, and a fairly useless Benelux cycle map, which shows only the major LF routes and large towns and cities). The afternoon might have gone a little better if I'd made that investment.

More water stood in my way after Dordrecht, this time crossed by ferry. I stopped and chatted to a couple of truck drivers while waiting for the boat, one of them kindly offered to take my photo.

See? It had definitely turned into a bit of a damp day.

The ferry took me into the national park of the Biesbosch, a lovely peaceful area with very few houses and a mixture of woodland, farmland and lakes. I saw herons, and discovered that 300 geese taking flight all at once make the most awesome noise.

The dedicated bike path came to an abrupt stop by the river at Pontje Steur. There was a bell on my side of the river and the world's tiniest ferry was on the other. The ferryman came out of his little hut, waved to indicate he had seen me, and set out across the 40-50m of water that separated us. The ferry was only a couple of metres wide, just enough to take a couple of bicycles or a few people.

It got sunny again towards the end of the day but I got very lost trying to get out of the Biesbosch park - my lack of decent map was not helping, nor were my efforts to follow the LF12 cycle route, which was not exactly direct, and as evening approached I started to need direct.

Eventually I found a little board showing cycle routes, and discovered that I had made little progress and was in danger of going round in circles. It was good to see a map and get my bearings back and I soon reached a small town called Hank on the edge of the park, with a campsite nearby.

Distance: 62 miles • Day 1 Route • Day 1 Photos

Day Zero - getting to the starting post

Before

This was hardly the best-prepared of bike trips. I finished working about a week before I left, after nine months of dashing back and forth across the country to London and barely seeing home. During that week Dgym and I went on a mini-break to Winchester to check out the area as a potential place to live, and of course pay a visit to Ralph the wetsuited penguin at nearby Marwell Zoo.



I cycled to Winchester and back, an approximately 130 mile round trip, to test out both me and the bike after so many months apart. We did OK and had a particularly lovely time crossing the New Forest.

Day 0

The day of departure arrived, Monday 31st August, and all I wanted to do was stay in bed. It wasn't exactly a positive start - I was already looking forward to spending lazy autumn days at home when I got back, and wondering why I was doing this at all. At least there was an answer to that question: after a crazy few months, I really needed to reboot my brain.

The packing was somewhat last minute, but at least well-rehearsed - my packing list hasn't changed much. I wasn't sure about the mini-pump (a Topeak Roadmorph) as the Schraeder end had given me some trouble a while back, but a quick deflation and reinflation showed the Presta side worked just fine.

I left mid-afternoon, surprised by how light the bike was. I hadn't packed less or got any stronger - I think it had just been a long time since I'd carried those kind of loads.

I stopped half way to the station to take my first photo of the trip, a perfect blue sky textured with several different types of cloud.



The train reached London and I crossed an unusually quiet city to get to Liverpool Street (Notting Hill Carnival was happening on the other side of town). I almost made it without needing a map, but went horribly wrong right at the end and ended up at Old Street.

This being the UK on a bank holiday, it would have been too much to expect the trains to run as normal, and I would like to thank the Sail Rail people for not bothering to inform me that I was actually booking a Sail Replacement Bus ticket. And we all know what the policy is for carrying bikes on replacement buses (If you don't, it generally involves hoping the bike will conveniently dissolve into thin air).

Fortunately, National Express' drivers are a good deal nicer than their policies and, after some discussion that I should perhaps follow the coach or be towed on a rope, my bike was stowed away into the vast underbelly of the coach. It looked like I was going somewhere after all...

After a long coach journey with the world's most annoying squeaky children, we arrived at Harwich ferry port. I boarded, and my bike was tied up on the car deck. I foolishly decided to carry all my panniers up onto the ferry, forgetting what a pain they are to carry all at once, and dropping water bottles, tickets and bags left right and centre. Fortunately the nice ferry staff picked up what I dropped and helped me to my cabin.

The cabin was a pleasant surprise, one of the nicest I've seen on board a ferry - the decor was good, and the bathroom didn't look too much like a ferry bathroom. I sat in bed eating the sushi box I'd picked up in London, and fell asleep easily after that.

New Plans

It's been a long journey, and I haven't even got on the bike yet.

It was some time in the winter that I got the idea into my head of cycling to Istanbul. It's a long way - about 2000 miles which for me corresponds to two months of cycling. Everybody who I told about it thought I was mad. But, who wouldn't want to cycle to Istanbul? It's that east-meets-west thing, the gateway to Asia, and seemed like it would be a really satisfying place to end a journey. I'd begin in Amsterdam. Amsterdam to Istanbul has a good ring to it, and Amsterdam's not far away. I'd finish work at the end of May, spend a couple of months at home and then set off in the autumn. The journey would take me across an entire continent, over the Alps and through so many different countries, languages and cultures.

As happens with so many of my travel plans, things didn't quite happen that way. I was really happy with the contract I was on and agreed to extend for an extra month, and then another six weeks. They finally set me free but I've only just stopped working, and September starts next week. Which has left me with a boy at home who's been missing me all year, but a brain that desperately needs a break before I get back to normal life. We talked and reached a compromise whereby I'd go away for one month rather than two.

But there's no way I can cycle to Istanbul in two months. What to do? Just do part of the journey? Go somewhere else entirely? For a while I was going to ride from Strasbourg to Belgrade, two cities I would really like to see, and do the other bits of the journey another time - but I haven't exactly been training and I wouldn't get much of a run-up to the Alps. (Momentum is everything.)

I've finally decided to split the journey into two halves and start from Hook of Holland. It would have been Amsterdam but there are rush hour bike-on-train complications there as the ferry gets in at 7:45am. I'll finish somewhere around eastern Italy / Slovenia / Northern Croatia, depending on how things go.

From the North Sea to the Adriatic. I think that sounds pretty good.