Since 2011 we have blogged 38 rides. Some are shorter, but our norm is 90 days. Our usual distance for a long ride has been dropping a lot, but even now it's about 4000 km. That's fairly far for such old timers, we think. 

We have not been too adventurous in choosing where to do our rides, but we can mention crossing Canada, crossing the U.S., and crossing Europe, from London as far as Vienna, and into the Czech Republic, and oh, crossing Hawaii and Yucatan!  But we have shied away from South America, Asia, Africa, Australia/New Zealand, the far north, and the far south. And now, the not so bike friendly roads of Canada do not seem very attractive, and the totally not so friendly U.S. even less so.

To the extent that we are still looking to draw a 4000 km line across some map, that rather leaves us with Western Europe. With Western Europe we absolutely adore the bike infrastructure, the food, the cultures, the architecture, and history. But still, it is a bit of a cramped bath tub to play in. I mean Vienna to London by bike is just 1600 km and Vienna to Lisbon is 3000 km. (By contrast, to cross Canada is about 7,000 km, assuming you skip Newfoundland.)

These rather self imposed restrictions and preferences  have seen us criss-crossing Western Europe on the diagonal in quite a few past trips. But we can say that we are not tired of it yet. For one thing, the route is always a little different. And we are so old that we routinely forget that we have been to a place before. There have even been times that we have landed in the same hotel, looking out at the same street, before the dim light came on and "waitaminute, we have been here before!".

The other thing about drawing a 4000km line across Europe is that it will almost necessarily have one end in the north and one in the south. (We are not inventive enough to travel in much of circles or flower petals, let alone a Fibonacci Scribble such as was designed by Jacquie Gaudet in 2022. (And anyway, that ended at just 2000 km!).

(By the way, the Fibonacci Sequence is the series of numbers:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, ...

The next number is found by adding up the two numbers before it.  If you stack squares with sides equal to these numbers, you can build up a spiral:

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I guess you could try to cycle a route like that, but of course in the real world, cycle routes are way more complex!

Back to our own case, if you are crossing north/south and back, then it makes sense to start in the north in the warmer (but not scorching)  months of early Fall, and then in the early Spring, to start south and follow the rising temperatures north.

The north and south "poles" of our 4000 km diagonal are Leipzig in far eastern Germany, where we have friends that can store our bikes, and Valencia, in Spain, where we have found a decent self-storage for the bikes as well.

Ok, fine,  for better or worse that is the background on our thinking and where we are planning to go.. So let's get on with it.  But wait! For some reason lost in our recent backing and forthing, our bikes are currently in Leipzig. Actually that's ok. By rights, we are set to pick them up in the early Fall, and cycle when it's warm in the north, to leave them in Valencia, ready for Spring.

But here comes a slight glitch. On our last trip (yes, of course, Valencia to Leipzig in early Spring) we noticed that we are not quite as spry as we used to be - even one year earlier. So when we blasted off by train from Valencia, in the opposite direction from Leipzig - to near the Portuguese border, to add a little challenge to the trip- we found ourselves  somewhat stranded out there - not quite able to pedal back over the mountains and headlands. We ended by renting a car for 9 days in Spain - a very scary prospect - given the chances of a fender bender on a narrow Spanish street. 

That experience (not to mention the mounting cost of these trips)  put it in our heads to possibly skip the upcoming Fall trip (Germany to Spain) and so to rest up our bodies and bank account. But we realized that if we then showed up in Leipzig in February, it would be in the snow. We would have to look for trains to the south to even begin pedalling. What a pain!

What to do? Let's shift to the next page, to see what happens next!