The Idea

The idea as it stands is to traverse Europe by bicycle taking.. well.. as long as it takes :) Below is slowly improving base map (or plan) as to how I’m going to do this, and the journey will start in January 09. I’m deliberately not planning on making this map any clearer than I have too I’m not even sure of the dates I’ve scribbled down, nor am I even sure of the total distances involved… There’s a lot I’m unsure of in fact. Either way with GPS it’ll be interesting to see how my eventual route differs from the original: The red line is the route (Indiana Jones style) and the green (will be) ferry routes I will take.

As far as planning a journey goes there are 3 things I’ve learnt to keep in mind:

  1. Schedule, that’s the where you have to be by when, the dates to cross boundaries the organising of time into chunks, Whether its catching a train or rushing to phone my mum in time for nervous breakdown.
  2. Plan, the next set of tasks that you need to achieve, I can’t plan the entire trip at best I’ll plan a month ahead of time as to where I’m going to end up. I’m not even sure how fast or far I’ll be able to travel in a day so this blows all my projections out of the water really.
  3. Idea, this I have, I wanted to keep things simple and as I’ve never cycle toured before I decided to do something that while mind expanding (by my meagre standards) was close to civilisation. Ultimately then I decided on a trip around Europe, As much of it as I could reach by bike. The journey kept snowballing until finally I was visiting almost every definitively European country.

Here is a link to the original map in various formats

  • Euro Route.svg (866.3 KB) – viewable in anything but Internet Explorer.
  • Euro Route.png (252.1 KB) – view in anything but can’t be rescaled without degradation.

In brief on these versions the red line is the route, the blue circles are birthdays and the blue dotted lines were ferries, the only reason this map evolved was to help me avoid the sub-zero temperatures that occur during the winter months … However I have recently been reading about Alastair Humphreys phenomenal world tour, and his biking through -40 °C.. suddenly things seem more doable. Well this is the good thing about an idea, it can turn on a dime and suddenly be something even more interesting ;)