This part of the journal I usually find the most difficult. There’s the inevitable problem of trying to squeeze several months of adventure into some kind of a coherent summary, plus the fact that you’ve just returned home to your old life that has been on hold for a while …. and it insists on getting right in your face.

That’s what’s been happening here. It’s been (three - no now four ) weeks  since we arrived back home, and in that period we’ve:

• Essentially got a new baby three days after getting home (more on this later)
• Started receiving Warm Showers (and fellow CB’ers Rose & Karo and Megan & Erin)) guests - six so far, strike that, I've phaffed around for another couple of weeks and the count is now at thirteen, most for 2+ nights (with many more requests turned down). I’ve delayed this so long that our ‘newborn’ has already featured in two other CB journals with nothing about him in here!
• Kick started some landscaping work around the house that we’d hoped would have been done while we were gone
• Plus the inevitable catching up with friends and family and ‘telling them about our trip’ because unlike you (bless your hearts), they didn’t read our journal!

Anyway, if I’m ever going to get this done, it’s just going to be a scattershot braindump. So here goes.

The New Metal

For me, the biggest new thing was a metal joint where the bones in my right knee used to be. We started the tour 8 months post surgery and finished when I was approaching 11 moths PS. Given that I didn't need to take a day off because of my knee, and for the most part it felt just the same as my left one, particularly near the end of the tour, I'd say the new knee was a complete success!

The other ‘new metal’ were our lovely new bikes - courtesy of Graham Mann. Zero mechanical issues, next to zero maintenance (topped up the tire pressure twice), and one slow leak - tube replaced & patched on a scheduled down day.

The bikes felt just like our old Tout's - the geometry was essentially the same so no surprise. However they were lighter, but still not light weight road bikes though. We were packed quite a bit lighter too , no camping gear, and given the more central position of the gear box, the bikes felt more lively and responsive. Although we've been Rohloff aficionados for many years, the additional gearing on the Pinion's and the central location won us over. Just really sweet bikes all round!

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The Route and Timing

We had such a great time doing a spring trip in 2023, our first, that we thought we'd do it again. After two times, I think we're sold of the April through mid June time frame for European trips now. Overall the conditions we encountered were more or less perfect for cycle touring. Temperatures were moderate right up until the end. Tourist traffic was also moderate and there was enough infrastructure (hotels / cafes/ restaurants / grocery stores etc) open to ensure we were well taken care of. We pushed the envelope a bit in the Dolomites - late May when most places were closed for their winter to summer transitions- but there was just enough stuff open for us to get by. Now armed with this knowledge we'll be a bit better prepared for some self-catering for future trips. This logistical wrinkle was more than made up for by the relative solitude we had for most of the tour.

As for the overall route, we knew it was going to have tremendous variety, and did it ever. We thought we’d be starting out with two weeks of flat riding, and we could have had that had we swung south of Milan. Choosing to circle around Milan to the north however resulted in a couple of ‘spicy’ days right out of the gate (eg. my ‘near death’ experience on day 1, 83 km and over 1200 m of climbing, first real bike ride of the year and ~9 months after a knee replacement. What was I thinking!!). After day three though we did get our flat Po valley warm up riding in and it was quite enjoyable, Bologna and Ravenna in particular.

The Croatian coast was more or less new to us, and we were pretty excited about it given what we’d read in other CB journals. Much like our previous tour through the inner farm land area’s of Croatia in 2017 however, we found the coastal / island riding to be a bit uneven. Some days were spectacular (watch this space - both K and I have a top 5 from here) but many were a mixture of great and not so great (none were bad - except maybe 10 km’s or so leaving Split) and we felt a bit of ‘ferry pressure’ when we were on the islands. We're glad we did this, but we're not sure it will feature  in future tours.

Slovenia on the other hand almost certainly will be a future feature! It's a small place, but every part of it that we saw was great. Good-to-great bike infrastructure (Borut still thinks this is debatable!), stunning scenery at every turn, beautiful villages and cities (Ljubljana is now one of our fave European cities) and very friendly people. 

After that it was the Alps - Julian, Dolomiti, Eastern, Lepontine and Rhaetian. We do love the mountains and every day here was spectacular - not always fantastic biking (thinking of the rain and fog while sitting on the train underneath Albula pass!) - but spectacular. We're not sure how many more years of 1000 m plus climbs we have left in us, but we will keep giving it a try.  We were very conscious that we were pushing the season a bit, particularly in the Dolomites, but the trade off of cooler weather and some rain (and snow) versus crowds and traffic we'll take every time.

Fully Booked vs Winging It

There’s a first time for everything, and for us, going fully booked was it.  What started out as booking a few ‘hot spots’, similar to what we did for our 2023 tour, cascaded into a complete ‘book out’. It was surprisingly easy to do, but I have to admit that we felt a little uneasy with the level of commitment we were exposed to.

What really drove us to do this was the relative lack of accommodation available on-line for the April - May time frame. We had a suspicion this was likely because a lot of places would be closed, not that they were fully booked up and that did in fact turned out to be the case. However, whether a place was fully booked, or closed, the end result for us was the same - limited availability when we were coming through. 

At the end of the trip, we only had to ‘blow off’ two nights of accommodation, and both of those were largely driven by the weather and us not wanting to hang around in cold rainy conditions (second night at Misurina and fourth night at Colfosco).

We used Booking.com for the most part, but similar to what a few other people have speculated, we started to believe that we got less desireable rooms at most places. This wasn’t a rigorous analysis, but on the occasions we booked directly with a hotel, we were often upgraded or certainly got a nice room with a view. That almost never happened with Booking.

The big platforms such as Booking or Trivago are convenient to use, both for finding places and managing the bookings thereafter, but we will probably go down the direct booking path in the future, particularly for multi day stays.  

Trains Instead of Uncomfortable Rides

Although we didn’t book any trains as part of our initial routing, we knew that they would be an option - and we took this path on three occasions.

The first, and probably the only one that I’d maybe consider ‘lame’ was our day leaving Bologna. We had a long (for us) 100 km day in front of us into a headwind along a virtually flat and straight run south of Bologna. Not the most exciting travel day and the end point of the day was our first ‘multi Michelin starred’ place of the tour. We didn’t want to arrive slightly thrashed and just a few minutes before our scheduled dinner, so the train it was. Turned out that this was one of those slightly chaotic and stressful train / bike adventures so many others have had with last minute platform changes necessitating literally hauling your loaded bike up and down stairs and through throngs of people. Maybe that was payback from the ‘touring gods’?

The second train was a few days later from Ravenna to Rimini. The original plan was to cycle from Ravenna to Pesaro, 104 km’s, with most of the ride along the Adriatic beaches (over 80 km’s). Given that this was the Easter weekend, and we caught a glimpse of the crowds and endless beach resorts a few days earlier on our ride into Ravenna, we were not really looking forward to it. It was a great decision as we cut out 50 km’s of what would have been pretty dreadful beach front riding through hoards of holidaying families. As it was , we had about 20 km’s of this to endure south of Rimini, with a continual decrease in ‘the hoards’ as we cycled south. The train trip was also completely drama free.

Our final train of the tour was the classic Samedan to Thusis train through the Albula tunnel in Switzerland. For many people, taking this train is a specific highlight of their Swiss holiday. It truly is incredibly scenic and historic. For us though, it was a necessary means to avoid what would have been a miserable 80+ km 1800 m climbing day in cold rain and fog. Once again the train was drama free - roll on roll off, and we were the only people in the very comfortable bike car. So, absolute no-brainer!

The take away from all this? We’ll probably not factor in trains in our initial planning, but when reality hits and the original plan doesn’t look so good, we’ll do the same as we did this tour, when the option is available :)

Gear - What was new and useful, what could we leave behind

We’ve done enough of these trips now that we’ve got our gear pretty much dialled in. Given this was our first by design  ‘no camping tour’ though, we were a little uncertain about some of the off bike clothing we’d need. Turns out each one of us would have left behind one pair of long pants (we each had two) and one less t-shirt (we each had three).

I’d also leave behind my UE Boom speaker …. Not because we didn’t listen to music, but beacause my iPad Pro has pretty good built in speakers and the Boom was more or less redundant (and almost 500g).

Two other changes we did make to our ‘electronics’ were: we changed out our 20,000 mAh Anker power banks for smaller and lighter 10,000 mAh ones. Given that we were going to be inside each night with access to electrical outlets, the smaller lighter versions just made sense and freed up more room in our front bags.

The most useful piece of new kit we had though was our European to NA power bar. We picked this up for about $20 off Amazon and it had a European plug and then three NA sockets, three USB A and one USB C socket. This made charging all of our electronics at night a piece of cake. No more packing multiple plug converters and having things plugged in all over the room (in the instances where you were lucky enough to have multiple sockets to use). Having everything in one place also made it less likely to forget something we’d plugged in. This sounds pretty pedestrian, and it is, but it was sooooo useful!

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