It’s getting on for five years since I first came up with the idea of cycling to Italy during my long summer holiday from work as a teacher. At the time, in those initial weeks and months of frankly secret planning (I was never even sure myself whether I would ever get to the point of setting off), I searched in vain for some central authoritative source of information about the Eurovelo network and more specifically the Eurovelo 5. And I wasn’t the only one out there searching for such information as when I started to collate my ideas online (on what was later to become CyclingEurope.org), people approached me with the false impression that I was the man with the answers. That certainly wasn’t the case and it really was a case of the blind leading the blind (although one of the visually-challenged parties wasn’t aware of the condition of the other). Things, however, are beginning to move on and the organisation that designed and promotes the Eurovelo network – the European Cyclists’ Federation (ECF) – recently started building a website that is trying to create that central point of information that I was hunting for. It was with great delight when the ECF asked me recently to be interviewed for an article on the new website all about my experiences (I wrote about the interview itself a couple of weeks ago and you can read the post here) of cycling from southern England to southern Italy. The first of the two articles has just been published on the website and you can read it by visiting the new website which is suitably-named Eurovelo.com. I feel as though I have now come full circle and that I really should get on with a bit more planning for this summer’s ride along the Eurovelo 8. Planning is going slowly. I’ll perhaps put a little bit more flesh on the bones of my plan later today, after my morning coffee down at my local café… Procrastination is an art.

P.S. The ECF haven’t got the countries I travelled through correct but they have promised to amend the article!