Bike touring - Europe and Australasia
A bicycle tour of Europe - May to October 1993.
This was my first bicycle tour (after a six day test run in Tasmania) and my second trip to Europe. I began in London where I had a little work to finish. After a tour of bike shops I had almost decided to buy a mountain bike for around £200 but found a second-hand 21speed mountain bike with a good quality aluminium rack for £95 and got that instead (most second-hand bikes I saw were much poorer value than this), plus rear panniers, a cheap handlebar bag and I had a small rucksack which sat on top of the rack, over the panniers. Although the bike was heavy and perhaps a bit slow (maybe 10% slower than my newer touring bike) I found it very useful. It feels more secure on rough roads / tracks / road shoulders / nasty corners / etc, which compensates for the extra weight and less speed. A better seat however would have been a wise investment. For a few pounds I picked up a road atlas of GB with a scale of about 1 to 250000 that I split up into individual maps - very useful. I used the cycling more as a means of getting from place to place more than as end in itself.Accommodation: Mainly at youth hostels - I like the cheap luxury - and camped occasionally with my basic camping equipment of tent fly, groundsheet, a few pieces of foam mat and sleeping bag. Staying in smaller towns and out of high tourist season means usually less crowding - most hostels were fairly empty.
Distances: Although I kept a kilometre count, I didn't record daily distances for first part of journey at the time and added in the distances later from a larger scale map - they tend to be a bit less than actual distance travelled. I ended up riding about 11000km altogether. If you have any comments/queries you can email me at my regular address rmartin@vision.net.au
The tour descriptions are in two parts:
- England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland [44k]
- England again, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Czech, Germany, Netherlands, etc [47k]
There are a few images in the text, generally of low quality to keep them small - they are around 6k each and linked to larger versions (20-30k) of the same image.