A month ago I decided to buy a bike to travel with. After talking with my dad who had done multiple long trips already we decided to bike together to Berlin. I had never been to Berlin and it was going to be over relatively flat terrain so it seemed like a pretty good first trip.

Our trip was part of the R1-route that goes from Calais to St. Petersburg. We did the white part:


In total it was 1150km (715miles) and we ended up taking the train back from Berlin after spending some time in Berlin to explore the city/musea/etc.


There were some setbacks, the roads weren't always that good (which gave my dad a total of 4 flats and luckily I didn't have any) and the directions were sometimes very hard to find and we probably did about 50-100km extra by riding in the wrong directions. We also didn't have the greatest weather which is pretty sucky when you're on your bike all day long. We had to spend some days just waiting for the rain to stop which just gets kindof boring. Luckily I had my new Kindle with me and ended up reading a decent amount:

- Hitchhikers guide 1,2,3,4,5 where the first 3 parts are realy good and the 4th is still decent but the 5th is pretty bad. If you've never read it and like sci-fi it's definately recommended even though it has been written in the 1970's. Which in itself is pretty amazing.
- Lies My Teacher Told Me ; A book about american history and what lies are currently taught in high-schools. Fun to read although I imagine even better if you're an american. The kindle edition had alot of errors which made it annoying to read but the content was great!
- The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements : Very interesting book about the discovery of most of the elements and lots of very interesting stories behind them. If you like to know a little bit more about what everything is made of and how we manipulate atoms/molecules this is definately a very good read.


Now to the trip itself. Because of bad weather predictions we postponed our trip by two days and started off on a fairly decent day, about 200 meters before we got to the campground it started pouring rain and we just avoided getting totally soaked.
This is our first day still in the Netherlands, my dad leading the way:


Because of the bad weather we ended up camping half the time and staying in hotels/pensions the other half because it is no fun to go camping in the rain.
Departing on the 3rd day expecting some rain during the day


And as expected the rain came, luckily we found a bus-stop to hide out at.


One of the many reasons of this trip was also to lose some weight (which didn't really happen that much but you can see that it's still needed ;-) Most of the days the sky looked like this. We did have one day of sunshine which was great.


Hitting the 1000km mark:


And then finally ariving in berlin:



I must say that the bad weather didn't really help this trip but overall it was pretty good. I'm not really sure what kindof trips I want to do in the future but think that on a trip like this it's great if you can stay in pensions instead of a tent because after a day of sitting on your bike it's good to have some comfort to relax and get ready for the next day.

When we got to berlin we met up with some of my dad's friends which was nice and we explored a decent amount of berlin, like going to a piece of the wall that's still standing:

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe


And also lots of other things like Checkpoint Charlie, The Berlin museum and a tour of a Stasi prison which was pretty interesting.

In our trip through germany we kept coming across icecream called 'spagettie-eis', before we left I decided I had to try it and it was actually pretty good:



And sofar my TR of biking to berlin. It looks like I'm going to start playing some more poker again so we'll see how that goes .

Robin out.