Kirsten got a 'Facebook memory from 1 year ago' picture today .... our pissing rain day in Slovakia. We also just booked flights to Geneva in two weeks time to do a short 'source to sea' trip along the Rhone river.

I guess that means that after a year, it's time to finish up this journal. So here goes.

Once again a great trip. Much different than our other very long distance trip across Canada in 2015, but just as rewarding in different ways.

Once again we were pleased with our plan and the execution thereof. A rough framework that we would work out day by day, and change if necessary. And change we did. Although our first plan was to get to the Black Sea along EV6, the reality of the later portions of that ride compared with the enticement of mountains, the Adriatic and amazing bike friendly routes to the west of us caused us to change our plans at Novi Sad. We have no regrets!

So in total, about 5300 km of biking over 62 days (on the bikes) and 16 days off-bike exploring the sites of some beautiful parts of Europe.

Here's the final route we took ... longer and more interesting we think!

Very much like our 2015 cross Canada trip, we started off with lot's of camping interspersed with hotels, and then finished up with all hotels after Budapest. A real bonus was being able to stay with a few friends along the way in Regensburg, Linz and Budapest.

Our equipment worked well, although we didn't take our front racks and panniers as we thought we were not going to be in the mountains. Turns out we were and it would have made the bikes handle a bit better if had our front bags with the weight distributed a bit more. The one and only piece of gear that turned out to be a flop was 'The Plug" - a rather expensive USB plug on our headset that's connected to our front dyne-hub. They worked well across canada, where we had little rain. However, another year of use and lots of damp wet weather in Europe proved their demise. for future use we will just bring back up batteries than can recharge a phone / garmin several times. Cheaper, simpler, more useful but a bit ore weight.

So, till next tour ... (which is only two weeks away ... a short one) ....