Another glorious day of sunshine, smooth paths and thrilling scenery. Our fast, flat run out of Innsbruck was punctuated by a fine rich coffee and pastry in a classy historic-centre cafe. That clearly doesn’t narrow it down when trying to identify where it was, because it seems all Austrian cafes are like that. We lunched…
Category: End to Ends
Austria 3: Langen am Arlberg to Innsbruck
A sixty-mile descent to Innsbruck today, all in gloriously sunny autumn weather on beautiful car-free paths. First though we had to get up to the 1800m summit of the Arlberg Pass, fuelled by about half-a-dozen eggs each from our splendid guesthouse breakfast. Not your ordinary lays, but fresh quail’s eggs, from their own organic smallholding….
Austria 2: Feldkirch to Langen am Arlberg
A glorious sunny autumn day in glorious alpine mountainscapes. It all made you want to don a gingham dress and romp through the meadows singing about the sound of music. Instead I made do with M&S shorts and a donated T-shirt, and resisted the temptation to trill along to Nigel’s on-bike sound system broadcasting Julie…
Austria 1: Bangs to Feldkirch
The Austrian End to End started with a bang. In fact, Bangs. It’s the place nearest the Liechtenstein border, which we crossed from late afternoon today, having cycled the Liechtenstein End to End – all 15 miles of it. Austria is a different proposition. A fortnight-sized proposition, of some six hundred-odd miles. With a modest…
Liechtenstein 1: Balzers to Ruggell
Liechtenstein is one of the world’s easier End to Ends. The microstate (pop. 40,000, about the same as Bridlington) is only 15 miles or so from top to bottom. Or, as we did it, bottom to top. Not only that, but you can cycle it virtually all on a flat, wide, car-free, tarmac path alongside…
(Belgium 7: St Vith to Spa)
With the End to End completed, today I cycled from St Vith to the train station at Spa to head home. To my delight, I realised I could do the entire 35-mile trip on the RAVeL network: Belgium’s excellent paved, wide, smooth, car-free cycleway system, generally on towpaths or railtrails. Most of the day there…
Belgium 6: Sankt Vith to Krewinkel
I completed my Belgian End-to-End with a 17-mile hop to the border this morning. Well, Belgium’s pretty good at handling hops. It was all very German feeling, of course: the look and feel of the houses, chalets and forests, hilly landscapes, and car dealerships. The ‘official’ easternmost settlement is Krewinkel, a village that was described…
Belgium 5: Liège to Sankt Vith
A sandwich of a route today: two bread-and-butter railtrails on the outside, with a meaty middle of Belgium’s highest point. All of this took me from the French-speaking heart of the country to its German-speaking minority eastern fringe. So instead of un sandwich, make that ein belegtes Brot. The forecast wasn’t anything to write home…
Belgium 4: Wavre to Liège
Today was a colourful affair of mostly riverside riding, the colours being forest green and cement factory grey. Yes, the Meuse is a grand waterway, but like most of Belgium, industry is never far away. But first I went through the Centre of Belgium. The country’s exact centroid – as determined by their equivalent of…
Belgium 3: Gent to Wavre
A functional day today, all on good main-road-cycle-paths, through Brussels and across the great linguistic divide. And all in perfect weather: sunny but not glaring, warm but not hot, breezy but not windy. I glided along canalsides from my Gent hostel with a continental buffet breakfast inside me, with a Dutch twist, in the shape…