The gang are back! After a three year hiatus I’m hitting the road with my bike to have an adventure. School finished on Wednesday and on Thursday morning I finalised my plans.
I love planning. Planning my summer travels is my summer term survival hobby. Throw in my insistence on not flying and you’ve got an exciting planning conundrum. This year the biggest challenge has been bikes on German trains in August - It’s been quite the pickle. Three international phone calls, two apps and one refund later the European trains are sorted (sans Dutch bike ticket which I’m very much assured is a formality).
Today -after several aborted online attempts - I headed to Waverley ticket office to get the UK leg booked. Oh the excitement on that ticket officer’s face. He approached the task with relish. To go via London or Peterborough? Is there bike spaces? What is the transfer time? How many changes? We locked things in, printed things out and discussed the price/convenience dilemma. It took a solid 20 minutes but now - via Peterborough and a tight change in York (they have ‘secret bike places’ should a delay make you miss your connection - who knew?!) my train is booked.
Onto the shopping portion of the pre-travel planning. A squiz at clothes then the bike shop. New cleats, inner tube, chain lube. Coffee stop. Life has changed somewhat since my last tour so after the train back home the planning continued. How often do you water the house plants? The garden? The cat? At what point do you pick the tomatoes? How do you preserve beetroot? Anyone want some lettuce?
Finally the map. Picking out my route, roughly. After the train to Flensburg a little bike ride up to Skagen. Maybe a ferry to Sweden, travelling south through one country or another. Eventually a train from Flensburg, a day in Hamburg (decided by the summer train conundrum) and then a few nights in Munster* for my traditional city mini break. Then train train, ferry, train train train train, home.
*yes, we have visited Munster before. Munster is the location of the last known photograph of my sadly missed Dawes Galaxy stolen on the disaster tour of 2017. Last time I was in Munster I was walking with a very pronounced painful limp and looking for burns dressings all day. I’m hoping none of this (or the other disasters that tour held) repeats itself. If it does we shall look back on this footnote with a sense of literary foreboding and complement it as a clever plot device.
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