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Once I'd raised Ben and let him know (warned him?) of my intentions, I hashed out a broad plan. Given that Eastern France and South-West Germany are not central Sweden - there should be a village every couple of miles - I didn't want to fall into the trap of over-planning my route as I had the year before. There I had felt compelled to reach my destination every day, and of course 100km days on paper soon turned into 120-130km days, which quickly drained my energy.

So I really just decided on a sketch of where I would go, based on the topographic map. I would start somewhere in Burgundy - Dijon was easiest to reach by train from Paris, but there were lots of appealing small towns where I could likely camp closer to the city centre and make a good base. The small town of Beaune, South of Dijon looked good, and had a good central campsite (this was the only accommodation I booked on the whole trip).

From there I would make my way East across the Jura and Doubs regions. At this point I hadn't decided that I would follow the rivers (and frankly didn't have a great grasp on how hilly, and indeed mountainous, it would be) - but I could see this would be an option. I knew I would meet the Rhine and the border somewhere between Mulhouse and Basel, and that I would need to plan where to cross. From there, my route across the Black Forest really was undefined - but I gave myself 3-4 days to reach Ben in Tübingen. It was less than 100 miles as the crow flies, how bad could it be?

For the second leg of the journey, things really were sketchy. I had a larger scale Michelin map, and some very good German cycling maps of the relevant area, and figured I could make things up as I went along. I was fairly sure I'd make my way back to the Rhine, probably near Karlsruhr. From there, it's natural to follow the Rhine North, but I didn't know for how long. At some point I would then need to cut West through either the Pfalz or the Eiffel, to reach Luxembourg or Belgium, somewhere in the vicinity of Trier or Bitburg. I didn't expect to cover this all by cycling - it seemed too far, and with not enough interest. The whole area is a network of regional train lines, and I figured I would cut out some of the duller parts and resume riding when the hills started again.

I knew I could fairly easily reach the Belgian coast, and then jump on a cheap and frequent ferry from Dunkerque or Calais back to England. In my mind, the trip out should have been as straightforward. I couldn't take the TGV down through France - for some reason assembled bikes aren't allowed on that line - but the "slow" IC train is in fact pretty fast by UK standards, reaching Dijon from Paris in about 4 hours.

The natural choice to get to Paris had to be the eurostar (through the channel tunnel). I love the EuroStar - it's not the cheapest, but is an incredibly quick and easy way to get to Paris. And, for a nominal fee, it takes bikes as luggage! There's a catch though - you need to book the bike in separately through the baggage handling department. To do this you need to call them up. After trying multiple times to book my bike in, waiting an hour or more on hold - and seeing the "advance" price of tickets double to more than £200 - I gave up. I could book a ticket and risk it, but if my bike couldn't be transported (or had to be transported later in the day), I would be stuck in Paris with no bike. It would have to be the ferry.

This lead to much juggling with Ferry and French train timetables. Generally, the choice was between a long ferry journey - possibly overnight - and a comparatively short train ride to Paris (e.g. Le Havre); or a comically short ferry trip (2 hrs Dover-Calais) and a long train ride to Paris. I wanted to get out of Paris on the Saturday. I toyed with the idea of doing the short crossing in the middle of the night, getting no sleep, and turning up in Paris super early. Fortunately I found a better way: I could make my way to Portsmouth on Friday night, and take the overnight ferry to Caen. The beauty of this is it left late enough I could get an evening train to Portsmouth, and arrived early enough that I could get to Paris in time to catch the Dijon train. I really didn't want to spend two days traveling, so became fixated on using the Saturday as efficiently as possible. Gah, and I thought transport was going to be easy...