Completion of the adventure trip and summary, day 42

Monday, August 28, 2023, day 42

Today is six weeks since we left Cologne. We rode almost 2000 km on the bike, sat on the saddle for almost exactly 100 hours, and we experienced an incredible amount. At the end of our adventure trip, we would like to give you a short summary, a summary and a summary of pictures.

On the first day we drove across the Eifel and covered over 80 km on the first day, so we left Germany on the second morning and came to Belgium. Belgium impressed us because of the incredibly good cycle paths, the Belgians are very careful about looking after their houses and gardens, everything is prepared tipitopi, but we also cycled for kilometers through the country without seeing people, but all the more cows. There were hardly any cafes, hardly any shopping opportunities, hardly any accommodation. After three days we had already crossed Belgium and arrived in France, in the region where our name comes from. Here, too, we drove for days through areas where we spent the evening in villages and small towns where there was neither a pub, a restaurant or at least a supermarket. Most of the time we went to the only shopping opportunity on the way and packed our saddlebags full of ready-made salads, baguettes and cheese so that we had something to eat in the evening. What we also remember about France is that the people there are very friendly, helpful and courteous, have a rather calm character and are considerate and calm even in traffic. We crossed beautiful landscapes, crossed the Meuse, the Seine and the Loire, and made good progress at around 60 km per day. However, we also associate France with the bad weather for cyclists at that time: it was still quite cool, so we rode with jackets every day, it was very rainy that we got hit hard a few times, and we had to go with us under very strong headwinds from the southwest. After almost exactly three weeks we had completed half of our route and arrived in the far south-west of France. Then we saw our first “fear enemy”, the Pyrenees, which we then crossed in two days on the Way of St. James in beautiful weather and much better than expected and came to Pamplona. We had reached Spain. The reward came after just 100 more kilometers, la Rioja, a mountain range that was in no way inferior to the Pyrenees. We also mastered that very well and have now also trained very well. After that we got closer to the team and it got hotter day by day, now it has finally exceeded 40° every day. Our new tactic was to start very early, even before sunrise, and to have completed the planned daily route before 11:00 a.m. That also worked very well. Nevertheless, for the sake of our health, we decided to cross the extremely hot region of central Spain by train, so we took the train from Madrid straight to the edge of Andalusia. In Córdoba we got back on our bikes and cycled the rest of the way to the Atlantic in the morning stages mentioned above. After almost 2000 km on the bike, we reached Huelva on the Atlantic and took the bikes to the ferry to Lanzarote, which washed us up in Arrecife yesterday after a 27-hour sea journey. We had no accidents along the way and we had no catastrophic breakdowns. Nothing serious broke on Andrea's bike, we replaced the brake shoes on the front disc brake along the way, which probably wouldn't have even been necessary. A spoke on my bike burst in France, which a bike repair shop in Bordeaux repaired wonderfully. In addition, Tom's bike had three punctures, each caused by a tiny, small thorn that had pressed through the now somewhat worn outer casing. So Tom was the consumer of 3 of our 4 replacement hoses. We bought Andrea a new saddle along the way, which made it much more comfortable for her to ride the remaining distance from Bordeaux. We had Tom's gears adjusted in an excellent bicycle workshop in Jaén, which had become out of place when the rear wheel was removed and reinstalled when the first flat tire occurred. The bikes are of such high quality that they rolled extremely well for almost 2000 km without the need for major repairs. We are very happy about the decision to bring them to Lanzarote because we now have first-class bikes here on the island.