It has been a long long time since I went on a good holiday so I was feeling the need. My last trip was in 2014 when I did my massive 6.5 week holiday all around Europe, I knew that I wasn't going to do something quite that long or involved this time. If you didn't see/know what I did back then the blog is still online at http://europe2014.currin.za.net/summary.html
This time round I had maybe planned to do a trip to Japan quite a few years ago but then ... Covid hit the world and our lives changed drastically, so that got shelved. Now that things are getting back to normal I started thinking of a trip again I kinda focussed more on something in Europe vs the East this time.
The main questions I had were ... What? Where? When? How?
I looked around at the sporting calendar to see what there was (F1, WSBK, MotoGP, cycle races incl MTB) and if I would try and pick something that linked up with attending something again. The venues and dates just didn't line up this time so I laughed off that idea and wouldn't attend one of those.
Then I started thinking ... since I got my bike in December 2021 I've enjoyed riding around so maybe I should do something bike related. That's where things really started taking off thought wise.
I have friends who live in Grenoble (Southern France), Munich (Germany) and Graz (Austria). My thinking was that I would try and do a loop of sorts more from a bike hiring logistics, or at least if not a loop start and end in places where a company was based to return the hired bike. Then in chatting with a good mate, Colin, in Munich, he offered to lend me his bike. Colin is bigger/taller than me so was not sure it would all work out well based on the frame size but after some investigations (and so it turned out in the end) all was perfectly fine. Once that was an option I decided that Munich would be my base and then to work out a plan from there.
More on the planning for the trip in the next post.