Back in 2011 we did our first long bike tour. It was about 7,000 km. from Victoria to Quebec City. The blog for it is on Cycleblaze - Grampies on the Go. Our first Warm Showers host, Art Birkmeyer, later confided that he doubted we would ever make it. But we had an unpredictable streak of toughness. It was unpredictable because we had no real cycling experience. On the other hand we had by then been married 44 years and with those years came a lot of life experience.

For readers of the blog at that time, we would like to think that like Bob Dylan in Joan Baez's Diamonds and Rust we "burst on the scene already a legend, the unwashed phenomenon, the original vagabonds". But in truth of course, all what we had were those 44 years, and whatever that had taught us. Those years had also given us four children and three grandchildren, and the reason to call ourselves the "Grampies".

Now in 2017, coming up on November 9, is our 50th anniversary. The number of grandchildren has more than doubled, and the number of bike tours is seventeen.

So what's next? First off, we can proudly announce that we are expecting another grandchild in March. So the Grampies business is doing well.

And we have been home from "Grampies Go Unhinged" for a month - so it must be time to hit the road! Going out on tour now would put us on the bikes on November 9, so what would be a fitting place to be? We were unanimous about that - Paris, the romantic City of Light. And where to start? Clearly Amsterdam - the centre of bicycle culture in Europe.

That's where the idea for the trip and the blog came from. We would go fifty days, one day for each year of marriage. On each of those days we would think back to what we were doing in the corresponding year. And we would trace a route between cycling centre Amsterdam and romantic centre Paris.

Let's do it!