It didn't take long, as on my previous trips, for me to increasingly fixate on this faint hare-brained idea. A little experimentation with the (ludicrously useful) German railway system and online mapping tools and I had the outline of a journey.

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I would once again be taking the Dutch Flyer, the StenaLine ferry that would take me from Harwich to the Hook of Holland. Once in Holland, the Dutch and German railways would take me and my bike for an remarkably light fee all the way to Berlin and onto Germany's other Frankfurt, Frankfurt (Oder) right up by the Polish border. I could set off from here up the shallow valley of the Oder, crossing Wielkopolska and Silesia and via the ancient city of Wroclaw to the Czech border. Crossing the mountains I would enter the rolling land of Bohemia: my intention was to avoid passing through Prague, but rather describe a loop to the South, crossing the Vltava and aiming for Plzen, home of Pilsner and Skodas. I would eke out the North-Western extremity of Czechia passing back into Germany to cross Saxony and Thuringia. Somewhere in central Germany - Paderborn looked like a promising rail hub - I'd jump on the train back to Holland and the North Sea.

Some meshing together of timetables showed that the public transport aspect should be eminently possible. Even with a couple of comfortable changes, I could reach Berlin in 8 hours, and the other Frankfurt in 9. There were some familiar annoyances - the secondary Frankfurt is so overshadowed by the main Frankfurt (Main) that it doesn't even appear on the suggestion box. More seriously, after two years, the rail link to Hook of Holland still isn't complete, and the replacement buses don't take bikes - so I needed to factor a 30km ride to the terminals at Rotterdam or Den Haag into my timings. I'd previously caught a 10am train following an 8am ferry arrival, but it was tight and wasn't exactly a relaxing beginning to the day of travelling. Being wiser, or at least older, I figured a midday train was safer, and I'd still get into Frankfurt in the evening. 

Some measuring of distances and I was surprised just much the margins of my journey added on. I was quite happy to cut these down a bit to focus more on the Bohemian portion. If I continued by rail the following day into Poland - to Poznan say, a major but somewhat unknown city outside of Poland which I had enjoyed visiting before - this would cut off a potentially rather dull stretch at the cost of a morning. Likewise, it seemed as easy to return from Kassel in central Germany as it did from Paderborn, so I fixed that as my (provisional) end point.

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Days of accruing more and more Michelin maps of the region and I started to tweak my route. Silesia should be reasonably easy to wild camp, and indeed there were campsites dotted through the countryside and in Wroclaw. From here I would cross a bundle of national parks, before needing to pick my route through the border mountains carefully: for some reason I'd never appreciated the brute geographic separation between the Czech and Polish land, but there are certainly Black-Forest scale mountains in the Krkonose and Orlické ranges. The pass through the town of Nachod might be easiest as a gradient - or I might be ready for something more challenging. Bohemia then rolled attractively all the way to the Vltava, which is pooled into large lakes upstream from Prague - again, eminent forest and lots of camping symbols even on my whole-country map suggested camping wouldn't be a problem. Google was very poor at verifying the existence of these - until I tried using "Kemp", "Kemping" and "Autocamp", which confirmed the existence of most of the sites on my map. From the river, I'd pull over more hilly ground to Plzen - where I intended to stay in the city. I figured my route through Germany could then be fairly indirect - I'd pass somewhere near Weimar, through the Thuringian forest and roll it up at Kassel. If I had the energy (doubtful) I could continue further, or explore the out haunts of Goethe and Schiller some more.

Reading this back makes rather a nonsense of my claim that this will be "unplanned" - the tragic fact is, however, that compared to my previous trips this is much less planning. I haven't scoped out specific back roads or cycle-able paths into national parks as I did in Sweden; and I don't have a fixed date to break the journey as in Tubingen. My Polish and Czech are not exactly fluent (or frankly, existent) - and I very much get the impression that tourism in some of these out-of-the-way places is mostly domestic. I fear miming will have to carry me far on this trip...