A Bike Ride in Europe

[Wirelizard]

So in about ten days I fly out to Vienna to join a group ride along the EuroVelo6 bike route, to wind up in Nantes, France 44 days and 2200km or so later!

The nominal excuse for the ride is to promote the Velo-City biking conferences, but for most of us it's just an excuse to get a fantastic ride in across a huge swath of territory!

We go up the Danube from Vienna, following the Danube across Bavaria almost all the way to it's end, then head to the Bodensee/Lake Constance and pick up the Rhine for a few days just inside Switzerland, then into France, ultimately meeting the Loire in central France and following it down toward the Atlantic to Nantes, which we reach on the 14th of July, Bastille Day.

I thought it might be kind of fun to mention the ride here, just in case there are LAF members somewhere along the route - it would be neat to turn my tour into a sort of rolling mini-LAF-meet if there are folks along the way to meet for beer or coffee or whatever. Maybe even an evening of gaming, if we can arrange that...

The route starts in Vienna on May 30th, goes up the Danube to Passau, Germany...


...then from Passau along the Danube thru northern Bavaria before heading to the Bodensee...


... then along the Rhine past Basel, entering France and heading down the Doubs River, meeting the Loire at Digion...


...and westward down the Loire to Nantes...


There's a list of the towns we're staying in on this PDF of the stages.

Any LAF members anywhere along the route want to meet for a drink sometime in June or July? 

[Cherno]

Oh man, that should be a beautiful route to go cycling on. The Schengen Treaty sure is a nice thing

[Wirelizard]

The Schengen Treaty is indeed useful, although as someone much more used to the lunacy of the US/Canadian border the whole "Well, we just wandered into another country and nobody seems to have noticed" thing once you're inside the Schengen zone is... odd. It feels somehow covert.

Even the Swiss border involved nothing more dramatic than a bike/pedestrian ramp over a motorway, a ride through an abandoned-looking border checkpoint and that was it...

I was kind of hoping for a passport stamp, to be honest, having not been to Switzerland before...

Just a short update to say the trip is somewhat over the halfway point, and it's been a blast so far. Austria, Germany and Switzerland are all behind us, I'm in eastern France as I write this with 1300+ km of biking behind us and about 800 left to go!

[Plynkes]

Wow, I missed this before. That looks bleedin' knackering.  

Going right through Saumur and yet I'm guessing you won't have time to see the tank museum? It's worth a visit if you can make it (and if you like tanks). Angers castle is nice too, and there's that Tintin thing at... Oh never mind.


It was odd crossing the frontiers for the first time once they did away with the borders. All the posts were still there, but dead and unmanned. Something in me yearns for the days when you would be glowered at by suspicious guards with machine guns, and the sullen faces of Baader-Meinhof gangers would gaze out at you vacantly from the wanted posters.

But mostly I prefer it now.  

[Dolmot]

How many pounds of lead have you bought?

[Wirelizard]

Wow, I missed this before. That looks bleedin' knackering.  

Each individual day is OK, but after four weeks on the road and only one day of no riding at all we're all getting a bit worn down. Just over two weeks left!

How many pounds of lead have you bought?

None at all. Haven't even seen a wargaming shop, to be honest.

The non-wargaming blog has many gory details: http://blog.wirelizard.ca/