OMG almost time to go…

In a few short days I will be setting off on a month long ride from Amsterdam to Budapest. I would be very excited if it weren’t for all the freakin’ anxiety. Anxiety about what? I’ve got no idea. I don’t even think its about the trip, but it sure is an easy place to put all this nervous energy! The glimmers of positive anticipation, though brief, have been awesome. And if I am to be totally honest, some of the stress is *fun* too. Or interesting. And definitely predictable. It’s all part of these trips for someone wired like yours truly.

This trip will be both my first off continent ride and also my longest so far. I chose Europe because I figured it would be different enough from North America to feel *foreign*, yet similar enough to be reasonably straight forward. Its my baby step towards cycling in more far flung places, a gateway to the rest of the world.

Then there is the cycling culture element. The thing about planning a bike trip in Europe is how many options there are. Eurovelo alone could keep a cycle tourist busy for years, never mind the country and region specific routes. As someone who doesn’t have very strong (maybe not any) decision making skills, I was flip flopping all over the place about where to go and struggling to determine some way to narrow the possibilities. Enter my Bike Brigade friend Jan, who happens to be German.

Jan drew not one, not two, but three completely different routes across Europe for me. It cost me a coffee and a pleasant afternoon of hanging out and exchanging texts! For this I am extremely grateful. A little research based on the general contours of one of Jan’s routes and the final outcome is this little map.

The pink lines are alternate routes: two shortcuts and an extension. Everything else is the *official* plan. Each uniquely coloured line is a segment pulled from different named, documented (and hopefully well signed) cycleways: Eurovelo 15 / Rhine, Main Radweg, Saale Radweg, Elbe Radweg, Vienna to Prague Greenway, and the Danube Cycle Path.

It should not surprise anyone reading this that there are fews thing I love as much as a good cycle path.

At approximately 2,800 km it may be a little ambitious for 30 days. Or it may not be. I’m not sure and I am also not too worried about this part. Europeans are probably even better at trains than they are cycling infrastructure, so I’m confident I’ll get to Budapest in time to catch my flight home regardless of what happens in between.

Usually I plan and often even book some or all of the places I’m going to stay on my rides before I even start pedalling. For a month this feels unwise and not particularly feasible. I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand I have the freedom to change my mind and reroute, slow down and/or speed up. On the other, one of the things I enjoy about these trips is not having to think much. When I know where I’m staying night after night the task is simple: move legs get there from here. When it’s not planned out I have to spend time looking into it, making decisions and probably playing all sorts of mind games with myself about how much further the next place will be and will I get there before dark, etc. Freestyling is not my nature, but freestyle I will (attempt).

Anyway, here are some thing I expect:

• Pretty good cycling infrastructure (very good actually, but I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself here)
• Campgrounds that resemble sports fields more than what we are used to here in the land of giant open spaces and many trees
• Being lost frequently
• Very old things, like castles

And some I don’t:

• Burritos
• Fish and chips
• Poutine
• Milkshakes
• Raccoons to share the above with

How I will power myself without these fuels remains to be seen. At least Haagen Daz is German, right? (TLDR it ain’t.)

I’ll be riding through 6 countries – Holland, Germany, Czechia, Austria, Slovakia and Hungary – but don’t have any sites, cities or particular places I plan to stop or spend any time. This surprises some folks. I mean, I’ll be there to ride a bike and fully expect to soak in plenty of culture, food, people and site seeing as I move a few thousand kilometers at a biking pace. I’ll stop when and if I decide to. And to do laundry.

Mostly, I’m just excited to ride a bike and spend 24/7 outdoors for a month.

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Administrivia

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To make this login business somewhat more reasonable you can sign in with Facebook or Google, in addition to the (not very good) option of creating a user name/password in this site. However, using these social sign in methods will still set you up an account in my site, so you’ll get automated emails about a password and such. You can ignore those. Your social login is sufficient and I have set the session timeout for 1 year so you should only have to login once. I am also able to add more sign in options like Microsoft, Github, Yahoo, etc. (sorry Mohrs, no Apple). LMK if these would make it easier for anyone, ideally ASAP before I leave so I have time to set it up. And if all of this sucks, you can email me and I’ll set you up an account and consider doing things differently next time.