Rotterdam to Paris

Ok, so we are officially the world's worst bloggers! ....but at an average rate of about $20nz an hour for internet, blogging hasn't quite been at the top of our priority list when we hit the internet cafes.

So, where to start?

From cycling down the West Coast of the States in June, we spent a fantastic week in the San Fransisco area... which deserves, and hopefully will get a blog all of its own.

From there we hit London at the end of June and caught up with all our friends who have migrated there (quite a few as it turns out), and did some siteseeing and had fabulous weather...we've been here three times now, and simply don't believe there are ever grey skies.

We then headed up to Birmingham and caught up with Emma Northcott and her new hyperactive bub, then up to the great metropolis of Manchester and caught up with Jo and Caleb Putt who showed us the sites of Manchester (the Trafford centre - a truly ah awe inspiring mall), and toured the lovely Lake District, Scotland, Whitby and York with us. Um ....this again all deserves its own blog and alot more detail, but, as with San Fransisco, we downloaded our photos onto our laptop, which is now in Holland with Lance's sis....so you'll have to watch this space!

Ok, so onto photo territory. From the UK we headed over to Holland via ferry and meet up with Lance's sister Trina who is living over in lovely Rotterdam.

Holland is a cyclist's paradise. It's just unbelievable how set up it is for the mighty bike. Cycle paths litter every road, no body rides with helmets, because you really don't need to - the cars treat you like porcelain dolls. And there's no such thing as hills, so what else can I say. Everybody rides, you see old ladies in long skirts, young girls in high heels, men in business suits...all on bicycle!

Trina took us out to explore Amsterdam, with its gorgeous canals, the fabulous Van Gough museum, and the Anne Frank House. We also spent the day at Arnhem national park riding little white fixies through bizarre landscapes. And of course the famous cheese markets still operating in the same fashion as they have for hundreds of years (well more or less).... brilliant photos of which are now on our laptop....promise.

Amsterdam canal (I think).

Dutch culinary delights....

From Rotterdam we rode South West down through NZ's namesake Zeeland area, along the North Sea dykes.

The inter-city network of cycle paths is fantastic -you can ride between any city or village, and never need to ride roads, and you have your own sign posts, that, most brilliantly, don't mysteriously disappear at crucial intersections like most of the rest of Europe....oh for more Dutch people to be involved in cycleway planning!

Unfortunately for the first day of cycling, when we neared the coast we quickly discovered the prevalent wind (better termed gale) was a southerly, which rendered us almost stationary, inching along for 60 back breaking kilometres. We averaged about 6kms an hour - it was beyond belief! The dykes however were awe-inspiring, massive structures that were incredible to ride on.

Wind turbines unsurprisingly litter the coast, taking advantage of the gale force winds.

The next day was luckily a little calmer, and we finally made it over the border to Belgium, to ride the most beautiful tree lined canal into the medieval town of Brugge.

Brugge is just beyond gorgeous. It's picture perfect stuff. ...what else can we say. We wandered around, watched old men playing boules, took canal rides, drank beer by the canal.

The Belgians do a number of things brilliantly - chocolate, waffles and beer... it was a happy few days in Belgium.

Truly, the waffles really are incredibly good... I don't know what they do to them, but they are in a class of their own.... good thing we were riding with the amount we consumed.

We then headed east to Ghent, another picture perfect little medieval town. Did I mention Belgium pastries are also quite phenomenal?

And then headed down to Lille, France, where we were to catch our train to Paris to catch the end of the Tour de France....

Route 101 Cycle Tour

Ok, so we’ve turned into the most useless bloggers in the world…. catch up time!

So since we dropped off the face of the earth since the end of May (well as far as Canada was concerned, probably the rest of the world didn’t notice) we spent the first 3 weeks cycling along the pacific coast of the states…. Well ok it wasn’t quite that straight forward, and pictures probably say it better and more interestingly, and well, its late and I’m tired. SO…

Our wonderful, obliging friend Suz drove us down to Aberdeen, Washington to begin the trek and rode with us for the day and camped the first night with us.

Leaving Vancouver early rather early (after dropping off our couch, the last of our furniture to the Sallies at 5am..)

(Twin Harbours national park action shot - our first stop)

Us, of course being Lance, myself and Raf, our NZ friend, who braved the trip and came all the way over from NZ, and was the most wonderful, laid back road mate and pack mule (mostly his stuff).....

(not such a great eater though)

One of the highlights was the incredible array of state parks we camped at - each with your own fire pit with grate, picnic table, landscaping, and array of beasts.... chipmunks, squirrels, deer, moles, and evil, evil racoons (thankfully no bears, well that we saw anyway). The camping system really is amazing, there are state campgrounds about every 50km or so down the coast, all quite afffordable (around $10-$15 for all 3 of us, so $5ea - nice), usually in the best locations (beachfront). NZ could learn something here....

So this is really quite hard to decide what to put in here and what to leave out... I won't bore you with details of all the countless towns we've ridden through, but more of a pictorial essay of the general highlights...some of which were.. Loong story short, we started in Aberdeen, and ended in San Francisco... the rest can be told later. But... as I said, some of the cool stuff...

Being in nature, away from emails, cell phones, traffic jams, etc etc etc

Being in sunshine, around beaches, just feeling all around summery. (okay, there were a few cold days, but I'm trying to make you feel jealous ok?)

Taking arty photos on the side of the road...

Having some time on your own, the road to yourself, (some of the time) nothing but your own random thoughts... and they really can get random out there...

Hi-Vis vests are always sexy.... and when you think your head is getting random, there is always Raf to remind you you're not the only one.

Playing with fire and all that goes along with that...

Riding over some epic bridges...I don't know why riding over bridges is so cool, it just is, I'm sure there is something psychological going on there. This one was loooooonnnggg (8km). (and kinda scary)

Getting up to the top of a big hill, knowing you've earnt your dinner, and thinking about the downhill to come.... oh... and the amazing views, which you should pay more attention to, but you're just sooo tired.

Riding through lush forests...

Eating alot of good, good food... like smoked tuna, calamari salad, beer marinated sirloin steak, chowder....

Bad American rental cars that crapped out on us, but could surprisingly still hold three people, three bikes and gear.... yeah long story involving a shoulder injury, a knee injury, bad weather and waning days....

Which lead to two days mountain biking in Fairfax, north of San Fransisco, the birth place of mountain biking, thanks to Marin Bikes who put us all up, fed us and lent us mountain bikes, so Lance could attend their press launch... nice.

Anyway, this one has gone on long enough for now, so Part 2 will come later, which will have some more on San Francisco and biking in Marin county, each of which really need their own post. Will try and get those up soon too...

Bye for now!

Easter weekend heralded an unprecedented four whole days off for us, so we loaded up our newly acquired Ortlieb panniers, and headed out to Vancouver Island. The rough route was to cycle down from Nanaimo to Victoria via Salt Spring Island, the main attraction being Victoria, the capital of British Columbia and retirement, and, so my guidebook tells me, a city that is supposed to be more english than England itself. We started out in true Pilbrow fashion, missing our first connecting bus by a whisker, and having a mad peddal to catch the one to the ferry terminal. I won't comment on whose fault this was. hmmmm

Four days-175kms-lots of holiday traffic-a serious lack of maps-and a freezing cold night of test camping our new lite weight tent-later, and we survived to blog...


So I'm new to the whole cycle touring thing, so I didn't really know what to expect. The first day we took the ferry from Vancouver and rode down from Nanaimo to Salt Spring Island, doing something I'll never do again, riding the whole way on a four lane highway as advised by our guidebook, which while it had a large shoulder the whole way and probably was fine safety wise, wasn't the best introduction to cycle touring, to say the least.

The highway did produce one of the only meat pies we've found in Canada, which, heated up in the microwave, tin pie shell, gladwrap and all, well didn't really redeem the highway experience. Yeah, that was probably the highlight of that leg.

We did finally escape the highway, and took the ferry to Salt Spring Island.


Salt Spring island, is a kind of Waihike meets pine forrest, home to many artists and the famous Salt Spring island mussels (which frankly, failed to impress given their sheer lack of size compared to nz mussels). Very cute, and much quieter and more scenic riding, the highlight being a fabulously long descent (well really, all the downhills were fabulous for me), after a very steep hill, down to the cutest little church which was open to people to look around in. For some reason there seemed to be a rash of cute churches in Salt Spring.


We spent the night on Salt Spring, camping in our new lite weight tent, 1.5 kg...

I didn't have a great night sleep... to be honest I'm not sure if it was because I was too cold, or because I kept waking up thinking how perfect our site was, perched on the edge of a provincial park, with no other campers around, for hungry bears waking up out of hibernation (which they are currently doing), to come and investigate. I don't think there are any bears on Salt Spring, but as they do swim I avoided asking any locals in case the answer was affirmative (I have a thing about bears in case you hadn't picked that up...brought on I think by being read gruesome bear attack stories as a young impressionable child, by some thoughtless primary school teacher).

We had a slightly mad end to Salt Spring island as we leisurely cruised into the harbour for our connecting ferry back to the mainland (island mainland that is), and had a frantic five minute race with the ferry as it was coming in... consulting the schedule in my bag would have been far too organised! There's a pattern here...

This second day of cycling took in the world famous Butchart Gardens, which seemed appropriate to take in given that we were visiting the proper little city of Victoria. The gardens were absolutely stunning, if somewhat mislead in the order of gardens they show you, going from stunning to lovely to average, to a non-existant rose garden pruned back for the season.


The day also introduced us to the joys of Victoria's cycleways... all flat, all off road (well mainly) taking us right downtown to about 100 m away from our hotel ... pure bliss!! Well done Victoria!


Love, love, loved Victoria! Apparently it was in a recession when it was in fashion to demolish all the lovely old buildings that every city now lords, and install various modern buildings that date within a year or two, so Victoria is a lovely little city full of beautiful old buildings, funky little botiques, many places to wine, dine and, most importantly, to do high tea. We stayed at the Strathcona hotel which was built in 1913, attached to which was a mammoth english pub called the Sticky Wicket, which had the lovely type of stodgy pub food and beer one needs after biking 130 km to get there.

We ate a lot, did the high tea thing in the cutest, kitschy tea rooms, the James Bay Tearooms, which still displayed photos of Diana and Charles in wedding day regalia, along with every other royal you didn't want to know about (Liz you would have loved it!).


Lance drinking his tea ever so properly...

Unfortunately Victoria didn't really turn on the weather on that third day, well until 5pm that night when we had just given up on wandering around in the rain sightseeing.

Some of the sights of Victoria...

The beautiful 'old lady of Victoria'...the Fairmont Empress Hotel, which apparently does a fabulous high tea, with silver everything and waiters in tails and all...but which at $80 a pop, was substituted for the James Bay.

There were, true to BC form, a lot of homeless people around, probably something to do with those free one way tickets Vancouver City was rumored to be handing out to them to get them out of the way in time for the Olympics. This one was impressively belting out some Jesus song in the rain, with quite the array of moves...

We then cycled out to the ferry to Vancouver on the Monday...via that brilliant cycle network which takes you past all sorts of fun things, like pig farms, cyclists taking their dogs for rides, that kind of thing...