Tania's cycling adventures

Our surprise of the day was Zülpich,  a place with a Roman history and an old castle. And a wonderful lake for swimming, which we took advantage of for an hour – very refreshing. Unfortunately I only took the picture,  when we were a bit further away already. Phil also took the opportunity to pump … Read more

Inspired by watching the Tour de Femmes ascent of the Mont Ventoux on TV last night we cycled up to the triple border point, Belgium- the Netherlands – Germany, first thing in the morning. We also reached the highest point of the Netherlands by bike. Although we needed to climb about 200m it was quite … Read more

The border today was interesting. Mostly it wasn’t marked, but the European signs did occur every now and again. The border also runs in streams, very picturesque. There were border stones and bunkers. Very subtle: the surfacing of the bike path changed. And my favourite: through towns, in one case actually along the middle of … Read more

We followed the Dutch-German border Southward as closely as we could today, interesting experience. We started in quite a beautiful dune-like area, where the path was sometimes along a steep fall – quite technical cycling. The border stones all looked similar after a while. Then a Roman road constitited the border line. We crossed the … Read more

We decided not to follow the Rhine any further, as we could not find accommodation for the night, the low water level is a worrying constant stark reminder of man-made climate change, and the German news reported on a forest fire in the Netherlands along our planned route back South. So we crossed the Rhine … Read more

As in Bonn the morning before I was very pleasantly surprised  by the number of cyclists in/near the town centre. In principle the cycling infrastructure is pretty good in Cologne, apart from the traffic light phasing. There had been a thunderstorm with rain during the night, which made the air really humid. Luckily we were … Read more

We knew the temperatures were going to be 15° above comfort level today (Cologne hit 36°C this afternoon),  so we decided to start early and not go far. It meant we saw this beautiful view at breakfast in Bonn. Even the early start did not save us from feeling hot and sweating profusely. Luckily we … Read more

Got going early to try to avoid cycling in the hottedt part of the day.  Phil had some of last night’s Schnitzel in a roll as a ‘Scnitzelsemmel’, I stuck to the more traditional cheese roll. Our first stop was at the ‘Deutsches Eck’, the confluence of Mosel and Rhine, where we were surprised to … Read more

As the weather is forecast to be very hot the next few days ( over 36°C) we fairly spontaneously decided to cycle North.  From Ingelheim this is easiest along the Rhine. We waited for the rain to stop and set off just before 10:30. The first stop was Ingelheim market to get some rolls and … Read more