Reports by Bike Hippies

A four week autumn tour from southern England, across France from the English Channel to the Mediterranean and around the north-western coast of Corsica.

The trip included visits to world-famous monuments such as Mont St Michel and Pont du Gard, beautiful mountainous landscapes of the Massif Central, the striking limestone cliffs of the Ardeche Gorges, and scenery which inspired the painters Monet and Van Gogh.

A short and rather hilly round-trip tour of Dorset, South Devon and Somerset, including portions of the spectacular Jurassic Coast.

A few days spent exploring County Clare on the west coast of Ireland. I live in the UK and travelled via Dublin on the ferry and train. This was a short and rather windy trip based around the coastal village of Doolin, and included a visit to the Cliffs of Moher.

Starting in the south-east UK we took the ferry from Portsmouth to Bilbao, travelling south west across Spain towards Portugal. We wanted to find out whether we wanted to live in Portugal - after staying there for a month, the answer turned out to be no, but we had a great trip all the same, encountering beautiful mountain scenery in northern Spain and challenging hills (and drivers!) in the Portuguese Douro region.

Journey from south UK to northern Poland on a bike and a recumbent trike. We stayed in Poland for a few weeks and then travelled home via Denmark.

We left our jobs and sold our house to go on this trip - part of the reason for going was to explore whether we'd like to live in another country. The other reason was to satisfy my craving for long distance touring.