My wife and I love to travel. Our ultimate dream is to live on a comfortable boat, sailing anywhere our fancy takes us. Unfortunately comfortable boats are known to be huge money holes, so that dream may have to wait a while.
Fortunately, we also really like bikes, so if we didn't want to spend a fortune, we could travel by bicycle instead. Recently we took our first try to see if we would like it. Well we didn't like it, we loved it! In fact I'm now more excited to do bike traveling than I am to do boat traveling!
We bought a pair of folding bikes, as our planned route included a couple of flights and train trips. They weren't cheap, but they are amazingly good quality, and I'm hoping they'll last a very, very long time. The little bikes are also easy to take on metro systems, or on buses, and you don't need to worry about them getting stolen when you go somewhere because you can just take them inside.
We started in London, yes that's about as un-londonish as you can get in a picture, but we picked the hottest week of the year to be there
Next up was Belgium, it was blooming beautiful
On to Germany, as you can see, we only do 5 star accommodation
From Germany we quickly crossed into Austria, where it was us, the bikes and the Danube
Except when taking the road less traveled
We usually made our way back to the river again though
My wife says this is a dork on a bike. But this dork never burnt his face or neck. Oh yes, we washed clothes every day, so we always had something hanging on the front or back of the bike to dry out.
On one of the days we past by a ferry without noticing. It meant that a 60km day ended up being an 80km a day. Those are tiring!
Melk, probably the highlight of the trip, and we never even knew there was anything to see there until we arrived ??? it was an amazingly good surprise.
Apparently this place had the best dessert my wife has ever tasted. Something like a dumpling soaked in syrup with cooked peach inside. If you're on a biking holiday you have a license to each yummy food.
We cycled up to Vienna, spent a couple of days there and then took a train to Budapest.
The perfect cure for sore muscles is a day spent in the thermal baths :TU:
We'd usually get up, have breakfast and pack the bikes and get on the road around 9:30-10am. Stop wherever we felt like it, usually around every 10km. Take a long lunch (er dessert) break somewhere interesting, and arrive at the next stopover at between 3 and 4pm. Then we'd wash the clothes we were wearing in the sink. Wash ourselves in a hot shower and relax a little. As it was light until very late, we'd only go exploring around 7 when it was cooler.
On average we cycled somewhere between 40 and 60km (25 and 40 miles) a day on the bikes, with our longest being 80km (55 miles) which we both thought was too far.
It was the best holiday we've every had, and something I could have done indefinitely.
In terms of the day to day costs (excluding bikes, plane and train tickets) you could get accommodation 30 Euro/person per day in cheap hotels/pvt room hostels. Eating out would be another 20-30 Euro a day. If you camp it's much cheaper, 10 Euros max p.p.p.n. Then if you go shopping for food you could eat on about another 10 euro a day each, for a total of 20 Euro/day, well within 4% of our current stache :)
On this trip we did cheaper hotels and private room hostels, eating out just over half the nights and it was still quite a cheap holiday. I'm hoping we'll camp next time, not only because it's cheaper, but because you never need to book when you're camping, so we can stay extra days if we feel like it, or stop in a town if we really like it.
Quite tough getting back into work mode afterwards, but the good thing about this lifestyle is it requires less of a stache to live on, so who know, maybe it'll become a full time way of life sometime soon :)