Birdlady42
It’s that time again – less than two weeks from wheels up and we just started organizing for packing. Ugh! But we do have some experience with this, so it will all be ok, right?
We started out cycle touring tied to big life events: milestone birthday, 30th wedding anniversary, etc. (see the sidebar for the list of our previous trip blogs). We’ve stopped needing excuses. We are taking every opportunity we can find to schedule a trip. Of course, the fact that we still work full time means that’s limited to just once a year, but we had originally thought we wouldn’t do more big trips until after retirement. But why wait?
This time, we’re picking back up where we left off two years ago on our Bridges, Castles and Bicycles trip: Orléans, France. There aren’t as many castles of major historical significance on this section of the Eurovelo 6 trail. Of course, any time there’s a major river in Europe, there are castles, but once we reached Orléans, we were out of the famous “Valley of the Kings.”
Sooo, since I won’t be completely distracted by all the famous castles – I was a bit like a dog seeing a squirrel last time, “oooo, look! Castle!” – we should be able to make more forward progress each day. With that, we are hoping to make it across the rest of France and at least peek into Switzerland at Basel by the end of the trip. It’s a stretch goal, but even if we can’t quite make it there, we’ll grab a train to Basel before heading back to Paris.
So come along with us, follow the blog and see how it goes. As an added bonus this year, Brian has started a YouTube channel for our cycling and we plan to share videos during the trip. See the link in the sidebar for that as well.