How time flies! Fourteen weeks and 7045 kilometres after starting out from London on April 23, the e-Bike Cycle Tourists are back in London preparing for the next leg of our e-bike world long distance record ride.
With a new laptop computer finally purchased in London after our previous one died days after reaching Holland in early July, we can once again keep the thousands of e-bikers who follow our travels up to date with our progress.
But before detailing our plans for the next three months in the UK, a quick recap of our travels in Holland over the past few weeks.
It is fair to say that we now believe we know Holland pretty well after one month and 1936kms of cycling there from Maastricht in the south to the Friesland region in the north and seemingly everywhere in-between.
Also, after surviving the worst summer storm to hit Holland in living memory, torrential rain, ongoing gale force winds, heat and cold, we are pretty confident we experienced just about everything the country had to throw at us.
Unperturbed, we cycled on through the aftermath of the major storm that in the space of about one hour snapped century old trees like matchsticks and littered the entire country with storm debris.
Given the dire warnings for torrential rain on the day of the storm we decided to have a break from cycling and hibernated in our tent in a campground at Utrecht in central Holland behind an old World War 11 bunker.
With both of us engrossed in movies on our laptops and with our earphones in, we amazingly didn’t even know the storm had hit until it was all over when we emerged to discover trees snapped and destruction all around us!
Clearly we picked the right place to set up camp, because our tent didn’t suffer any damage and the huge tree we were under was one of the few not to shed huge limbs.
Wild storms aside, Holland is a beautiful country to cycle through, has an amazing cycle network, is a far more diverse country than we ever imagined and is a destination every cycle tourist should explore.
The only thing we moaned about every day was the brick roads in every village that quite literally shook us to pieces. The result? As soon as we reached London Gary purchased a new Brooks leather saddle complete with springs for the next leg of our journey.
After all there is just so much punishment an aching backside can take!!
Preparing to e-Bike Through England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales
With our travels in Europe now behind us – for the time being – all thoughts are now on continuing to clock up the kilometre count in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales as we head towards the existing world e-bike record of 16,047 kms and hopefully a final tally of 20,000-plus kms.
With maps, a bicycle saddle and a new laptop purchased – and after an emergency visit for Gary to a dentist to remove a tooth that broke off below the gum line – we are now ready to set off in a couple of days’ time.
From Harwich where we left our Tout Terrain trailers after arriving by ferry from Holland, we caught the train to London to get our Haibike Trekking xDuro e-bikes serviced at sponsor the e-bikeshop.co.uk.
With our bikes now back in tip top condition, the plan is to follow EuroVelo 12 – better known as National Route 1 in the UK – up the east coast of England from Harwich to Inverness in Scotland before heading south to Glasgow, Dumfries and Carlisle and then on to the west coast of England to catch a ferry to Dublin in Ireland.
From there the plan is to circumnavigate Ireland – weather permitting – before returning to Wales for the journey back to London.
In total we have allowed 11 weeks to complete all of the above e-biking, with the hope to have about 12,000 kilometres on the odometer when we finally arrive back to London.
Suffice to say we are excited about what lies ahead and can’t wait to see the UK from the best vantage point of all – our Haibike e-bikes!