Adventures on the bike
“Europe 2012; Part 2” I suppose. Having dropped the bike at the hotel and received the ‘standard Italian warm welcome’, we retreated to the cool shade of our room. Before I go on, (and I may have brought this up in the last part) I’d never been to Italy before now. To be honest, with …
Or “Europe 2012; Part 1” if you prefer. Going over and trying to process the many gigabytes of video shot with my pair of drift HD cameras, I’ve entirely neglected the photos. It took me a couple of days to get into the habit of taking photos during our holiday last August and as a …
One last night in France. No cities, no tours, no nothing. The final night to be spent away from everything in the countryside. At least that’s what we decided when looking around on “Chambre d’Hotes de Charme”. We needed something north of Reims, relatively close to Calais to avoid having to haul ass the next …
As you may well imagine, one of the main reasons for stopping off in the Champagne region was to drink some of the locally produced booze. Imagine!?! Not just drink it though, see all the in’s and out’s of it, to do the tour so to speak. Having done some research online before setting off, …
Leading with a photo this time, this was taken on the way to Reims when I pulled over to get out of the wind for a minute. I will admit to the two nights in Reims being somewhat of a backup plan, the original plan was to stay a night or two in the nearby …
I suppose technically that’s not true, given that we arrived in Riquewihr on the afternoon of day 5. For the sake of continuity, lets imagine all these wonderful events took place on day 6. Riquewihr is a strange place, it didn’t quite match up with the photos and descriptions I’d seen of it before we …
After getting out of the road works mess that was Dijon (twice – long story), I decided to give the scenic route a miss in favour of getting to the mountains early in the day. So it was a couple of hours on the motorway instead. I’d never been this far east in France before …
Given the amount of ground we were covering, there were always going to be a couple of ‘down’ days. Days where the aim of the game was to get to the next 2 night stop and get to places where we’d already researched the area. From Maison Laudiere to Dijon is roughly 580km, not an …
Before I move on, I need to write a little note on our first two nights stay. I found Maison Laudiere (as many people do) on the UKGSers website. They have a seemingly very loyal following and everyone that posts about them leaves glowing reviews. Their location was put into a google map at an …
We must have been another hour and a half on the road from Mont Saint Michel before we reached ‘home’; Maison Laudiere, on the edge of a very large forest full of wildlife that yearns to frighten the piss out of you. More on both the wildlife and the accommodation later. Having received some superb …
Day 0 began at about 5:30pm on the Friday with loading up the bike for the approx 256km trip to Cork. By the time we were on the road (and a few km beyond the M50 interchange) I already felt like I was on holiday. Julie wasn’t so easy to sway, she had an exact …