Biking Archives - Page 58 of 99

Next stop Cuba

Posted on November 4, 2015May 28, 2019

cuba - geoff jones proposed route — First attempt at designing a route

It’s time for another bike tour :-). With Cuba and the USA making up I thought it would be good to visit Cuba before major changes start taking place.

I’m intending to cycle end to end, about 1,000 miles. Flying into Havana then hopefully, flying/busing/training down to Santiago de Cuba . This should allow the trade winds to blow me back up to Pinar del Rio.

From all my reading it seems as if mobile 3G and WiFi could be a problem so not sure how I’m going to keep in touch or for that matter navigate. 🙂

I’ve bought a DeLorme Inreach satellite communicator which acts rather like an old fashioned pager but using the Iridium satellite network so it should give total global coverage. It bluetooths to the iPhone app etc. In theory I should be trackable at 10minute intervals plus I can twitter/facebook the text messages.

The map of my travels with messages should be here https://share.delorme.com/GeoffJones

First Update: I am sorry to advise VS63 05NOV is delayed until 13.00. Check in closes 2rs before.

South East Asia bike tour post index.

Posted on January 27, 2015January 28, 2015

Here are links to each of my days cycling from Hanoi to Singapore through Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand & Malaysia during 2014.

Working out how to return to UK! Grenaa to Aarhus

Posted on September 21, 2014January 7, 2015

Last night was a bit of a shock when I discovered that the next Esbjerg sailing on DFDS was on Tuesday & an even bigger shock was that it was full, as well as all the next few sailings. How a huge ship can possibly be full so that one guy and a pushbike can’t be accepted is a total mystery to me & probably explains why the ferry will cease to operate at the end of the month.

The next choice was overnight rail from Aarhus vi Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Rotterdam etc to the Hook of Holland for a overnight ferry. It struck me as very long winded way of getting back and quite expensive too.

Flightscanner bought up my bête noire, Ryanair, flying from Aarhus for a reasonable £46 and leaving at a sensible time in the morning. Also I could take the bike for an additional £43 and I could also could put my saddlebag in the hold all for a total price of £111 a hell of a lot cheaper than the rail & ferry would cost and would take a couple of hours so I could be back on Tuesday. OK their site is full of man traps etc but hopefully I avoided them.

Since the Aarhus airport is actually halfway between Grenaa and Aarhus I thought I would drop in and check out about my bike etc. Wow! the two guys couldn’t have been more helpful, plying me with coffee and insisting the bike would be well loaded (as they do it) they would even dig out some cardboard and tape so I could wrap it up on Tuesday am. They even rang the local Dabhostel at Ronde 14km away, after the website said it was closed, in fact they have withdrawn it from Danhostel to run it privately so the owners agreed to give me the hostel keycode and for me to leave the cash Tuesday morning. If it all works out a highly successful end for the trip and also opens up the opportunity of bringing the bike back to continue the North Sea Cycle Route to Sweden & Norway. Interestingly the airport guys said that Ryanair is becoming more reasonable when dealing with passengers now 🙂

I’m now in my tiny cabin at the CabInn Hotel in Aarhus a bit of a come down from last nights splendour but it has everything: shower, internet, power points & bed.

So another surprisingly hilly 46 miles, with some quite bumpy stretches, on the clock see my Strava and a few pics here

PS: Unbelievably, as Victor Meldrew would say, the wind direction has flipped 180 degs to a west wind, so today it was still in my face 🙁

North Sea Cycle Route – Hadsund to Grenaa

Posted on September 20, 2014April 8, 2021

Today marks my final day for this trip on The North Sea Cycle Route. From Hamburg I will have pedalled 716 miles or 1145km of the 6000km route. So 19% of the total route done leaving a lot still to do 🙂

I slept according to Fitbit an amazing 9hr 41min in my little cabin with ‘only’ two pit stops all night. Interesting thing I noticed today is that the Danish word for book is bog so the colloquial English “going to the bog” could mean going to read a book – which I’m sure a lot of people do in the bog 🙂

Another first for this or any trip is that the little Udbyhøj Cable ferry offers free coffee in a takeaway cup – an excellent idea I thought. Certainly compared to some of the surly crew I have experienced on some of the many ferries I’ve been on.

It was another pleasant sunny day although it’s taking longer each day for me to warm up. Saw a few racing cyclists busy mending punctures but another quiet day although I met two Danish elderly ladies inspecting, what the sign says, is Denmark’s oldest tree but their English was poor so I couldn’t really understand how royalty had only given up their land a couple of hundred years ago. Although the crown appears in a lot of places on my travels here. This section only had a couple of unpaved sections and no sandy ones.

I’m afraid I let my trip advisor down by not booking the hotel Jens recommended in his daily email, when I got around to doing it, it was full 🙁 So i decided to splurge a little and booked myself into The Kystvejen conference centre mega hotel, maybe a bad choice with some big truckers event going on.

Tomorrow I think I will continue on Route 5 for 75km or so down to Aarhus then get the train across Denmark to Esjberg taking just over 2 hours.

Todays Strava is here and pics here

And in other news – Oh! Someone has woken up at Google and realized all my photos are geotagged with their location and are viewable by the public. Apparently they may be seen on Google maps. Here is a link if it works – Crikey, allegedly, my 44,517 pics on Google have been viewed over ELEVEN MILLION times!!