After two years of delays and many more years of wasted opportunity, we did finally get that Norway trip done. Seven thousand plus kilometers of roads, road works, mountains, fjords, ferries and fantastic fun. Or if you look at it the way I chose to do it, 3000km of motorway across multiple countries and about […]
Read moreInstead of writing one of my usual long and bewilderingly boring all-in-one holiday posts (which I’ve already got half written thanks to some 2am insomnia a few weeks ago), I’ll try something a little different this time around. As I’ve probably mentioned in the past, Switzerland is a country that I’ve been wanting to stay […]
Read moreWaaaay back in May, I bounced the thought around in my head and eventually here on paper that I needed to be procrastinating less and doing more of the things I love doing. At the time I’d been forced to completely give up on the idea of getting to Norway this year and cancelled or […]
Read moreI’ve been trying to structure this post in my head for a few weeks, with only marginal success. I partially blame not being able to get out on the bike for this, as that’s when I usually do my best thinking. When I got the new bike at the start of the year, I made […]
Read moreThe five reasons you haven’t gone touring yet. I originally wrote this back in mid-February and planned to edit and publish it not long after that. However, with current world events as they are, I really tried to stop thinking about being on the bike so much. After a few weeks in the Covid-19 uncertainty […]
Read moreA camera pans around a small, messy room. Past a desk strewn with cameras, camera parts, empty coffee cups and notebooks full of hurriedly scribbled beer recipes, travel plans and other important things that need to be remembered. We see the figure of a disheveled man hunched over a computer, mumbling incomprehensibly. As the camera […]
Read moreIf it seems I’ve only just written a blog entry about our 2015 trip to France, it’s because I have. The same thing that kicked me into motion to write that entry has prompted me to write this one about our 2016 trip (to mostly the same places). The 2019 trip will again be to […]
Read moreIn (much the same) exactly the same way I started the first post recalling our 2015 trip to the Dordogne region, I start this one while thinking about booking 2019 holidays. In the spirit of eventually finishing what I began, here we go. So here we are in the Dordogne, in a sleepy but rather […]
Read moreI had originally mapped this meandering waffly mess out as a 10 part saga. The kind of thing that’d keep on giving all the way to the end. As this is supposed to be a photoblog and not a repository of short stories, I’m going to squash all the final detail in this post. Parts […]
Read moreI woke the following morning to what must have been an answered prayer, it wasn’t as cold as it was supposed to be, and certainly not as cold as it’d been the previous few mornings. There was a stint of hasty packing completed, followed by one final eggy bacon buttery breakfast and enough coffee to […]
Read moreThis ‘fire & ice’ route was also hastily borrowed from my friends down the road at the bike rental outfit. Lots of low(ish) roads with scenic vistas and rides through valleys. That kind of thing. Except it’s never really that easy, is it? ‘Another cold start’ I thought, as I stepped back inside the hotel and […]
Read moreI awoke early to a temperature of minus four (centigrade, for my American friends) after a restless night of worrying about my battery and cursing myself for not replacing it before I left. The conclusion I came to last night still held, there was nothing I could do about it now so I’d just have […]
Read moreI woke up in Kempten and the first thing I did was to have a cautious peek out the window. Cautious because I didn’t want to see any rain and my room was directly overlooked by a dozen others. I didn’t want to give any unsuspecting guest more than their share of horror this early […]
Read moreI sat eating breakfast with the other guests, less than a dozen people at this time of year. Mostly (if not all) bikers. We watched the rain move over in worryingly heavy and increasingly persistent sheets and tried to plan our escape, all going in different directions. It seemed inevitable that at least one of […]
Read moreAs I already said, it was a cold start for both me and the bike. The sun beating down on me made it bearable, and gave me some shred of hope for things to come later in the day. I worked my way through what seemed more affluent suburbs of Folkestone, beyond the shuffling hordes […]
Read moreI had a grand plan. It was mostly successful. With the summer doing it’s usual death rattle in mid July, my window of opportunity to actually see something outside of Ireland was closing fast. As we had started looking at the possibility of buying a house in March or so, any possibility of going anywhere […]
Read moreIt’s funny how (some years) every year it seems to take the jolt of thinking about and getting to planning the current years holiday to actually go back and remember that I still haven’t processed nor uploaded any of the previous year. ‘Funny’ probably isn’t the word, I’m sure there’s a word, the meaning of which is a […]
Read moreWith the lavender fields, rolling hills of Provence and daily (hourly) thunderstorms now in the rear view mirror, we were off to spend a few days in the Alps. Nothing really new here, they’re just mountains and in previous trips we’ve pretty well covered this ground here. In the French Alps anyway, anything outside France […]
Read moreLeaving Carcassonne, today’s journey was about 350 km. In the name of it not taking all day (and because we had to be at our destination within an hour of a time I’d set with the property owner), today was going to be very much a motorway day. As luck would have it, this also […]
Read moreAll the convenience of getting to France, without the pain in the arse of the 3 hour motorway trip from Dublin. That could be a tag line for Cork tourism and a slogan for Brittany Ferries all in one. Now somewhat freshly married, it was finally time to set off for three whole weeks, touring […]
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