Category: Interrail

I’ve cycled in a lot of places with silly names. Dull, twinned with Boring. Jump. Bedlam. Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, etc. But I’d never been to Silly itself, a small Belgian town southwest of Brussels. Today I took the very sensible decision to visit as I passed en route to Paris. Silly has a population of 8,500, and…

A short day today: just two dozen miles or so of riding, finishing the Vennbahn from St Vith to Troisvierges just inside Luxembourg. This part of the route, unlike the previous 55 miles, mixes quiet streamside lanes, tarmac paths across farmland, and the odd gravel road with the railtrail sections, almost – but not quite…

British railtrails are typically smooth, wide tarmac. For two miles. Then gravel. Then muddy path. Then a fenced bridleway round a cement factory, then a path through a housing estate, then a shared-use track alongside an A road. Well, not in Belgium. Their RAVeL network, much of it on old railway lines, is generally excellent:…

Europe is strewn with points where three countries meet, so they’re not that special. (There are no genuine four-country points in the world, by the way.) But, being in Bratislava after finishing our Austrian End to End, we couldn’t resist cycling through the fog today to the junction of Slovakia, Hungary and Austria. A dozen…

After a few days back in England for various reasons – jobs, jabs, appearing at major cycle touring festivals, having teeth out – I resumed my Interrail trip this morning. I took a dawn ferry, this time equipped with touring bike, from Dover. It’s a rather scruffy and down-at-heel place, and wasn’t looking its best…

Brussels was only a stopover before taking Eurostar back home the following morning, but even though we were only walking the centre, we still got some cycling sights. Poechenellekelder, a touristy but well-rated bar lavishly endowed with Belgian beers, was also lavishly endowed with bicycles, adorning its facade to mark the Tour de France’s passage…

One of the most sublime stretches of cycle path in Germany is along the Rhine between Bingen and Koblenz, winding between storied headlands and quaint romantic villages. Instead, we rode the dull bit further downstream between Bonn and Cologne, past chemical factories and through industrial estates. To be fair, we had cycled the good bit…

Germany rivers well. (In German you can verb anything.) I’ve done some of the big-ticket waterway routes – Danube, Mosel, Elbe – so it was nice to explore some of the smaller ones. The Neckar ambles down from the Black Forest hills to join the Rhine at Mannheim, a place I now feel familiar with;…

What was it like to cycle in Ancient Rome? To find out, we cycled the classic intact-Roman-Road stretch of the Appian Way, the Empire’s A1, which ran 365 miles from the capital down to the Brindisi. As the Via Appia Antica, it’s a popular hire-bike jaunt with visitors, going from the Baths of Caracalla in…

Ah, yes. Venice. La Serenissima, whose elegant centre has been car-free since the 1600s. Bike-free too, sadly: having emerged from the train station of Santa Lucia to the abrupt, astounding canalfront facades of the old town, you are informed by signs forbidding all bikes in the historic centre, even pushed. Nigel could have hidden his…