Author: Rob Ainsley

The forecast rain came as something of a relief after days of autumn sun. It’s possible to have too much honey, after all. But all this Scotch mist was making me a little homesick, as was the headline in the morning paper about our government back home: Britisches Chaos. We had a good-humoured conversation about…

With nobody at hostel reception to open up the bike store for me, we couldn’t check out. So I took matters, and the key, into my own hands, trespassing behind the unstaffed counter and rummaging in a drawer to find it. It was a damp, cloudy morning, as if the weather had suddenly remembered overnight…

A plunge to the valley floor this morning, and then a day of more green and lovely plains in warm autumn mountainscapes. And, perhaps most pleasingly, a rhubarb Streusel: sunny Austrian castle-town cafe meets gloomy Yorkshire forcing-shed. One stretch of riverside cycle path in Bischofshofen was so good we could have turned right round and…

Thanks to the hens and ducks in the hostel garden, we could enjoy a fine breakfast of fresh poached eggs on toast. Thanks to my cooking, they turned out scrambled. Thanks to my aim, they were barely on the plate, never mind the toast Still, it set us up for the morning, and I proved…

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…

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….

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…

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…