Contents: Tours (5)
Reports by Bob Lucky
All descriptions are in English, unless otherwise noted.
Tours
| Cycling the Heart of England
tour started July 2003 I just completed a bike trip through the heart of England, starting in London and following the Thames to Oxford and Stratford-upon-Avon using the National Cycle Paths. From there I curled down through the Cotswolds. It's probably a general rule of life that things are never quite what you expect. My expectations about cycling are based on my experiences in the United States, and I discovered in two cycling trips in England that things there were often different and surprising. After my recent trip cycling mostly on the National Cycle Paths in England I made my own list of the points that I would make to someone planning a cycling trip there. This advice is intended for people outside the UK, as I'm sure that UK citizens would know much more about cycling in their country than I would. However, they wouldn't see the cycling through the eyes of a foreigner to their country. So as a foreigner to England, here's my own list of advice and surprises. It will rain, so be prepared... |
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| Biking in France
tour started 2002 This is a trip I took in 2002, starting in Dinan in Brittany and biking northeast along the coast through Mont-St-Michel, across the Cotentin penninsula and the D-Day invasion beaches in Normandy, ending in Honfleur. There are nine pages here, each with about a dozen pictures and detailed description. |
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| Biking in Ireland
tour started 2001 A trip that I took in 2001, starting in Cork, biking north up the west coast, and ending in Galway. There are nine chapters here, one about planning the trip, and one for each day of biking. The descriptions are quite detailed and there are lots of pictures. |
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| Biking in Holland and Belgium
tour started 2001 From Bob Lucky's Biking Page. This is a trip that I took in 2001, beginning at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, following the coast of Holland south and crossing into Belgium. East across Belgium through Bruges and Ghent, and then north back through Holland. There are nine chapters here with detailed description and lots of pictures. The sun is now shining brightly, and for the first time I don my sunglasses. After a while the bike path turns into a dirt path that is shielded from the wind. Except for being careful about rocks and pools of water, this is very pleasant biking. [...] The bike path goes along the shore leading to the bridge, with sheep grazing on the landward side. |
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| Cycling the Danube Bike Path
These were our initial worries: the trip was too easy, it was too crowded, and the scenery would be monotonously the same for the length of the river. As it turned out, there was some small truth in each of these worries, but none was nearly as bad as we had anticipated. [...] I had read that the Danube bike path is very crowded in the summer months, and that since all riders start from the same intermediary points (the same hotels) at about the same time, there are traffic jams on the path. As it turned out, this worry was greatly exaggerated. The path was reasonably crowded, particularly near the towns on the weekends, but there were other long stretches when we wouldn't see another cyclist for perhaps ten minutes. We did get in ``synch'' with certain other small groups that we would encounter from time to time, but we never saw any of our own tour group after the first morning. About once an hour we would be passed, or would pass, a ``peloton'' of perhaps 20 to 30 cyclists, and every fifteen minutes or so a solitary biker, looking like he was doing the Tour de France, would pass us at great speed. On balance, I wouldn't have called the path particularly crowded. |
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