Keith thanks also for the encouragement to do a journal. I’ll aim to do one but not sure when. Procrastination is my middle name.

Re the new 20” wheeled Brompton, does look interesting. Like all Brompton gear, it’s superbly designed for the folding function. However it seems to be very heavy even for a steel folder. It’s 2kg+ heavier than my steel 26” wheeled touring bike.

This hefty weight could be a problem when trying to manhandle the folded / bagged bike onto and off trains. And perhaps also meeting checked bag weight allowance on airlines  when every kg counts. 

In the 20” wheeled folding genre, there are quite a few competing brands. eg Dahon, Tern, Bike Friday, KHS and even others which are direct clones of Brompton.

Singapore, Taiwan, China and Japan offer a broad range of models. My favourite 20” wheeled folder is still the USA-made Bike Friday New World Tourist. 

The conundrum is that we covered most kilometres by train, but we spent far more hours getting about on our bikes than we did on trains.

Great journey, Graham, and so happy for you that you could do it with your son.  Your map touched a few memories -- see my note below.  I enjoyed your photos, and the folders looked right at home.   Bikes & trains go so well together in Europe -- wisht I could say the same for other parts of the planet, esp our own.  

Our daughter, Meg, lived in Berlin between 2010 and 2015, so my wife and I visited her as often we could, both together and separately.  Her presence there nudged me into longer tours, starting with an Amsterdam-to-Vienna ride in 2012.  I met up with Meg in Vienna--DeutscheBahn named its Hamburg-to-Vienna train the "Vindobona", a nice nod to the Romans' name for Vienna.  We continued by train to Prague, where my wife joined us in that beautiful city.  (I had first visited it in Aug 1971, returning to Canada from Zambia -- my sister and brother-in-law were working there with the Canadian embassy.  This was just three years after the Prague Spring of 1968...)  Berlin offers ready access to northern Europe as well, so Meg and I took and train-and-bike safari to Denmark in Aug/ Sept 2014.  We passed through Flensburg, site of the German Naval Academy, where my dad had been stationed for a year or so just after the war. 

Let me echo others' encouragement that you retrospectively construct a journal of your train-and-bike rides.  Don't apologize for your irritation with the phrase "forward planning", BTW:  whenever I hear it, I ask why two words are needed, as "planning" is forward, by definition.  😉

Cheers,  John

Hi John, thanks for the additional encouragement to journal this multi-modal tour. I’m even more motivated to make the effort.

Berlin was the highlight among many highlights. Not only is it a very bike friendly city, but its recent, turbulent history feels a lot more real to me than even the ancient wonders of modern Rome or the renaissance beauty of Florence.

 A significant chunk of my ancestry is from near Berlin, so perhaps there’s some sense of being back in the home patch too. I was surprised how much of my school boy German surfaced from the depths of memory.

I’m pleased the Forum post and sketch map brought back your travel  memories too. You’ve seen a lot of the world with the assistance of bikes.

Thanks, Graham.  Funny how language used long ago can pop up.  I studied German in high school in the early/mid '60s, and - lo! - visiting Meg 50 years later, it resurfaced.

Here's a story from Berlin I think you'll enjoy:  It really is its own distinctive place, I learned.  Meg said that her friends used to say, when they were leaving to visit their parents, "I'm going to Germany for the weekend."

I was surprised and delighted to see Rosa Luxemburg's name on the side of buses, if you can imagine.

There are all these places with all these associations:  In early Sept 2014, I was cycling into Berlin from the north and west, after visiting  Ystad in Sweden, and re-entering Germany at Rostock (wanted to ride through the Brandenburg Gate from that side, y'know), and one of the first suburbs I encountered in Berlin was -- Spandau!  "Jeez", sez I, "This is where Rudolf Hess was imprisoned..."

I was impressed and humbled by the readiness of so many young Germans to confront openly the horrors of their 20th-century history.  Our Meg, for example, was a member of the public education team of the Ravensbrück Memorial Site.  Ravensbrück was the Nazis' concentration camp for women.

I have German ancestry on my dad's side of the family.  His people were Jutes, we understand, from Schleswig-Holstein, what is now the border country of Germany & Denmark.  They were farmers who settled in the SE corner of England around the tenth century.  It was a fertile, well-watered place.  As a result, his forebears were on the defensive side of what's called the Battle of Hastings, in 1066.  'Cept the battle didn't take place at Hastings -- that's on the coast, where William's army landed.  The battle proper took place a few miles inland, at a place called Senlac Hill.  It's now a small village called, appropriately, Battle.  The cemetery there is full of Saxbys.