Big adventures around the corner for us. On 13th July, we will leave London with our tandem bicycle, a tent, assortment of clothes and electronics to spend 10.5 weeks cycling across Europe.

Where did this idea come from?

Well… It was originally my idea, I read about cycle routes across Europe and decided around about the time that I turned 31 that by the time I was 40 I wanted to have cycled from the Atlantic Ocean to the Black Sea. I thought that we could do the trip in 2-week blocks, and that would be some of our holidays planned for the next few years. Robin says he remembers me, giving myself a challenge of cycling further distances.

But then covid-19 pandemic happened, and we spent those long weeks, which turn into months, which turn into years in lock downs and restrictions. Spring 2021, we brought our tandem and it has given us immense joy to do day rides, weekend trips and week-long cycles. We love being out of the tandem together, so we decided that we would do our European cycle trip on our tandem. Plus we wanted to do some traveling together, we’d hope to do some in 2020, but obviously didn’t.

In spring 2022, I ran as a candidate in the Edinburgh local elections – unfortunately, I didn’t win. As we were walking home from the count, disappointed with the result – we cheered ourselves up by saying to each other, “well, at least now we’ve got the time and freedom to do that cycle trip across Europe”. And so here we are, one year after we made that promise to ourselves and a year of saving to make it affordable – we’re off!

We had originally planned to do this trip in Autumn 2023, because Robin doesn’t do very well in hot temperatures, BUT – some other exciting news – he secured a new job with Nesta, as Mission Manager for Sustainability in Scotland (at least, I think that’s he’s new title). Essentially, focusing on heat pumps and heat networks in Scotland. He starts his new role in October. Which means we had push our cycle trip plans forward a couple of months to get a decent amount of time away.

The picture above shows our route in the stages we’ve got mapped out. We are currently planning to visit 11 countries. We are following Eurovelo route number 6 from Nantes, France to Constanta, Romania; we have a stretch target to get to Istanbul.

We’re so excited about this trip that we want you to share in some of the excitement. To that end, we’ve created this fun quiz for you to take a guess/place a bet on what things we might experience during this trip.

We’ll post regularly about the trip here, or you can follow me on instagram for regular pictures and videos: @megan_mchaney