November 22, 2017
A bit of background
I'm surprised it's taken me this long to publish the journal of our first tour in Europe, but it's well past time to put it up somewhere that might wear better than the yellowing notepad I carried at the time. I've done well to not have lost it before now, and it's time to quit pushing my luck.
To set the stage a bit: Rachael and I first met about five years before this tour, and started biking together almost immediately - even though she hadn't been on a bike since her childhood until I showed up. This was our first tour in Europe, but our third tour of some significance: in 1989 we celebrated our first anniversary with a month-long loop (unpublished so far) beginning and ending in Montreal and taking us through New England, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick; and in 1991 we biked from Dunedin to Aukland.
The trip to New Zealand was actually meant to be in Europe instead. As soon as we returned from Canada we started hoarding savings and vacation time for what we were envisioning as an epic ride from Paris to Athens in the fall of 1991, by way of the Balkan peninsula. Those plans went up in smoke when the Balkan Wars broke out and Yugoslavia began to disintegrate: Slovenia declared independence in June of that year, about the time we were starting to think about flights to Paris.
So, New Zealand was the consolation prize. It was a great and memorable tour of course, but our hearts were still set on Europe. As soon as we returned from Aukland we began hoarding time and money again, and came up with a new plan: a large loop beginning and ending in Paris, with Florence as the apogee.
Back then we were of course way younger, and by necessity considerably more frugal. Here's what we looked like back then:
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By this point in our riding careers, we had abandoned the camping equipment and were staying solely in commercial lodging. Our style was much different though - we had a basic itinerary planned out, but we took each day as it came and hunted for a room at the end of it. We traveled light, but not as light as we do now - a fair amount of space and weight went to our maps, our library of paperback novels, and a few dozen rolls of film. I didn't keep an equipment or packing list, so I can't say much else about what we took other than the bikes: I was riding a Trek 420, and Rachael a Bianchi Volpe. It was new that summer, as was her first Bianchi Volpe that she'd replaced with this one after the first was stolen on the day she bought it.
That's enough background for now, but I reserve the right to come back and pad this out later if the inspiration strikes. The journal, save for correction of typos and such (Ed: and, for the addition of editorial comments from the present, in italics), is pretty much as it was written then. It looks like this:
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Oh that's a CRUEL thing.
2 years ago
2 years ago