Tag: Greece

The Cycling Europe Podcast: Episode 069 – Susan and Ron Crump – Cycling Amsterdam to Athens

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In the autumn of 2022, Susan and Ron Crump, a retired couple from Kentucky in the USA set off on their first cycle tour. Instead of dipping their toes in the shallow end of the cycle touring pool, they plunged into the deep end by embarking upon a 3,500km cycle from Amsterdam to Athens. Along with two more experienced cycle touring friends – Pam and Ralph – this is the story of their trip; the preparation, the execution and the aftermath. They may have been jumping for joy upon arrival in Athens but were they jumping for joy throughout the cycle? And has the trip been a springboard for future rides or will their next visit to Europe be on a cruise ship? 

The Cycling Europe Podcast: Episode 068 – Tony Lenihan – Cycling Bilbao To Athens

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Tony Lenihan, a retired policeman, works for his local council in the English Midlands as their ‘Sustainable Travel and Wellbeing Coordinator’. He’s also a keen cyclist and, in the early autumn of 2022, after more than 40 years of work, he decided to take a career break and head off on a solo cycling adventure from Bilbao to Athens. It would be a 7-week ferry-hopping Greek odyssey that took him through northern Spain, to the islands of Sardinia and Scilly, across the heel of Italy to Brindisi before sailing the Adriatic to his final destination of Greece. He talked to The Cycling Europe Podcast about his continental experiences… but also about ‘active travel’ in the UK and how the country measures up (or not) to its European neighbours. 

YOUTUBE EXCLUSIVE: Episode 068 Of The Cycling Europe Podcast

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Tony Lenihan, a retired policeman, works for his local council in the English Midlands as their ‘Sustainable Travel and Wellbeing Coordinator’. He’s also a keen cyclist and, in the early autumn of 2022, after more than 40 years of work, he decided to take a career break and head off on a solo cycling adventure from Bilbao to Athens. It would be a 7-week ferry-hopping Greek odyssey that took him through northern Spain, to the islands of Sardinia and Scilly, across the heel of Italy to Brindisi before sailing the Adriatic to his final destination of Greece.  He talked to The Cycling Europe Podcast about his continental experiences… but also about ‘active travel’ in the UK and how the country measures up (or not) to its European neighbours. 

EuroVelo 8 – Mediterranean Route: (My) Once-In-A-lifetime Experience

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It will soon be 10 years that I set off to cycle along the Mediterranean coast from Cape Sounio in southern Greece to Cape St. Vincent in southern Portugal. My route was inspired by the EuroVelo 8, although it was much less developed back then than it is today. I saw some EuroVelo 8 signs in Catalonia but aside from that, I’m not quite sure I saw any elsewhere. And after Valencia, when I was beginning to run short of time – I needed to be back at work at the beginning of September – I headed inland, away from the coast in order to complete the journey without resorting to jumping on the train.

Manos Charalampakis: Cycling In Athens – The Good, The Bad And The Beautiful!

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Attentive readers will hopefully remember that, way back in 2013, I flew to Athens with Reggie (the bike) with the intention of cycling from Cape Sounio in Greece to Cape St. Vincent in Portugal, following the coast of the Mediterranean and as later recounted in Along The Med on a Bike Called Reggie. Before setting off, I had arranged to meet local cyclist and journalist Manos Charalampakis. Manos works for a newspaper in Athens and, among other things, he often writes about cycling. Indeed he writes a blog for the newspaper’s website and earlier this week he got in touch with a few thoughts about being a cyclist in Athens.

Along The Med: Three Years Ago Today

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It was August 28th 2013 when I completed my cycle from southern Greece to southern Portugal. The full story here or the even fuller story here… And here are a few photographic memories. Full marks to anyone who can identify where they were taken; Greece, Albania, Montenegro, Croatia, […]

Reading And Writing Encouragement

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Now back in the UK after my successful cycle from Tarifa to Nordkapp, at some point over the next few weeks (or more likely months) my mind will turn towards completing the European cycling trilogy of books that started with Crossing Europe on a Bike Called Reggie and […]

Cycling Day 8: Mérida To Cáceres

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Click here to see the detailed statistics of today’s cycle. It required a short climb out of Mérida this morning to rejoin my almost constant companion on this leg of the cycle, the N-630, but it wasn’t too many minutes into cycling along the road that I stopped […]

The Mountain Equipment Firefox Jacket

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After pondering over whether to buy some new Ortlieb panniers (see previous post), my mind remained focussed on the general theme of ‘equipment’. I really need to set some kind of budget for getting hold of what I need to buy. After having cycled across Europe twice already, I […]

Cycling The Eurovelo 1/3: The Maps

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While maps are on my mind (see previous post)… I have a newly discovered love for Marco Polo maps. But before I get on to them, let’s back track a little. I can’t imagine there will ever be a day when I ditch paper maps altogether; when I cycled […]

Cycling In Norway

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When I cycled from Greece to Portugal in 2013, I spent most of my time pre-trip thinking about Greece, Albania and, to a certain extent, Croatia. I didn’t spend too much time considering the western European countries through which I would be cycling. In France, a country I know […]

Cycling Insurance Matters

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Like all insurance, I suppose it only matters if you make a claim but as you never know when that will be… OK, you know how insurance works. Only a few years ago insuring your bike was out of the ordinary to say the least and if you did, […]

Share Your Adventures With The World

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That’s what I did, via the publishers Completely Novel and this week they used the image above to publicise a new section of their website encouraging others to do the same. The photograph was taken on the shore of the lake at Ioannina in northern Greece in summer […]

10 Minutes To Go… #cycling

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In just 10 minutes – at midday – you’ll be able to read an exclusive extract from my forthcoming book ‘Along The Med on a Bike Called Reggie‘ here on CyclingEurope.org. The book will recount the tale of my cycle in summer 2013 from the Temple of Poseidon […]

Word, The Words & The Wordle

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Just as with the first book, the first thing that I needed to do requires nothing more than a bit of patience and a lot of copying and I have spent several hours today doing just that. I am conscious of not just publishing a blog. If you […]

Heading Home…

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It didn’t take long for the practicalities of life on the road to kick in after my arrival at Cape St. Vincent. As I was recording the video clip in the previous post my mind was on the clock as I knew that the campsite supermarket closed at […]

Cycling Day 34: Nîmes To Béziers

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I’ve just heard on the radio that the Prime Minister back in Britain wants a ‘cycling revolution’. Well, good luck with that but its a shame he wasn’t cycling with me yesterday as I made my way along the coast from La Grande-Motte towards Béziers. Some excellent examples […]

Cycling Day 22: Trieste To Caorle

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So I find myself back by the Adriatic coast but this time in Italy. Just to the north of Venice in a place called Caorle. Or is it Porto Santa Marhgerita? I’m certainly staying at the (very busy) municipal campsite in the latter but I have cycled back […]

Rest Day 5: Novi Vinodolski

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When I normally say ‘rest day’ it is no such thing. It’s a ‘day off the bike day’ but today really is a ‘rest day’. I won’t go into detail but I wasn’t particularly well yesterday evening. The symptoms were more associated with a bug of some sort […]

Cycling Day 20: Pag To Novi Vinodolski

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Time to catch up on events of the last 24 hours… For the first time yesterday (cycling day 20) I suffered in the saddle beyond the point of comfort. I self-diagnosed myself as a little dehydrated, combined with that slight fever you can get from having lots of […]

Cycling Day 19: Skradin To Pag

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This place is comedy gold but more about where I am staying tonight later… It was a very quick job packing up back at Chez Zorbin in Skradin. I had a quick chat with him before I left and he explained how he was an engineer and used […]

Cycling Day 16: Dubrovnik To Podaca

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The plan over the next week or so is to cycle a minimum of 100km and find a campsite to stay in overnight. Today was day one of the plan, and it worked a treat! Leaving Dubrovnik and all the other tourists who had flocked there wasn’t difficult. […]

Cycling Day 15: Tivat To Dubrovnik

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If proof were needed (and can I say that it isn’t) that this was just one long mad dash from A (the Temple of Poseidon in Greece) to B (Cape St. Vincent in Portugal) then today was that evidence. Which isn’t needed. [Get on with it, please…] I […]

Thoughts On Albania

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Like many probably most others I came to Albania with a number of preconceptions. In the main they have so far turned out to be false or certainly outdated. What I’ve discovered is a country that appears to be heading in the right direction from closed communist to […]

Cycling Day 9: Ioannina To Saranda

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If I had any real worries about cycling into Albania (they weren’t for dramatic effect, surely?) they have certainly been dispelled by today’s events. Waking up at the campsite in Ioannina was a delight. Looking out over the lake and across to the mountains is the kind of […]

An Evening In Ioannina

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This really is another side of Greece. Isolated in the mountains as it is, the town is frequented mainly by locals and a few hardy tourists but if Ryan Air opened up a boat plane service between the Thames Estuary & the lake here, people would flock! It’s […]

Cycling Day 8: Kanali To Ioannina

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Sitting here in a café sipping coffee on a rainy afternoon in the mountains is very reminiscent of summer 2010. Over the last couple of hours my mind has been cast back three years on many occasions due to the wet weather since I arrived in town… Today […]

Cycling Day 7: Mitikas To Kanali

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It was indeed a shorter day in the end and nothing untoward happened. Following coffee in Mitikas it was a relatively short cycle to the much nicer Paleros where I had planned to meet Ed Cox. Ed is cycling from Bristol to Brisbane and he had contacted me […]

Cycling Day 6: Nafpaktos to Mitikas

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I’m in Mitikas. Didn’t arrive until about 8pm but more of that in a moment. I eventually dragged myself away from the café in Nafpaktos and headed back in the direction of the bridge. It’s a very photogenic thing and I spent a bit if time snapping photos […]

Early Morning In Nafpaktos

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So, from the jaws of potential disaster comes another pleasant surprise. In this case it is the small coastal town of Nafpaktos. It’s quite bustling on this Monday morning as the residents wake up to another week at work, play or (let’s face it for most of the […]

Cycling Day 5: Olympia To Nafpaktos

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There are some days which, however simple you think they might be, end up being anything but. Today was one of them. Lets roll the clock back to last night. I do get frustrated on those ‘rest days’ when I’ve done the resting bit or in the case […]

Rest Day 2: Olympia, Greece

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The reason for trekking all that way across the Peloponnese was, of course, to visit the ancient ruins of Olympia. I don’t want to make this to be too big of a thing but if you read my book about cycling to Italy you may remember that I […]

Cycling Day 4: Levidi To Olympia

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I’m not sure why I ever thought that I’d be able to cycle all the way from Corinth to Olympia in one day and then have time to have a look around the ruins here before setting off the following day for Patras. It was never going to […]

Cycling Day 3: Corinth To Levidi

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If cycling day 1 had been a little bit of a shakedown for Reggie, today has been a shakedown for his rider! I set off early this morning from the campsite in Corinth with high hopes of settling into another campsite in Olympia later in the day. I […]

Cycling Day 2: Athens to Corinth

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It took me an age to pack last night in the hotel. As per usual I had emptied all the panniers as soon as I had arrived on Sunday in order to find things which obviously necessitated replacing them before I left. If only I had a memory […]

One Month To The Off…

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The picture here would have been far better with a wild vista in the background but when you live in a third floor flat it’s tiresome taking everything out of the building for the sake of one photo to mark the fact that in exactly one month we […]

A Visit To Tent Heaven…

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Tent heaven  or the nearest I have ever come to tent heaven  can be found on the third floor of an old mill in the Calder Valley of West Yorkshire. It’s home to Springfield Camping and is the kind of shop that you really could live your entire life exploring. […]

Dispatch From The Eurovelo 8 Frontline

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Those of you who are paying attention (no? not you?) will remember that Monica Piercy is also cycling from Greece to Portugal but that she is about two months ahead of me. On a purely selfish basis, this is extremely useful indeed as she can feed me with tantalising snippets […]

The Eurovelo 8 In Maps

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When I cycled the Eurovelo 5 to Italy, all my maps were Michelin 1:200,000 scale maps and there were ten of them in total – see the overview map of Europe here (I didn’t take the Belgian ones by the way as I cut off Belgium from my […]

Bristol & The Handmade Bicycle Show

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Bristol is home to many things. Cycle paths carved into the paving stones of the streets, ice cream vans that are made by Mercedes, signs thanking you for not using your car (should you have one), pretty colourful houses in rows, intriguing street names & the first section […]

Albania: Gav McDonald’s Story

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Albania remains the mysterious part of my trip along the Eurovelo 8 from Greece to Portugal and I am fascinated by the stories of those who have cycled through the country. I met a chap called Gav McDonald recently at the London Bike Show. On his company website […]

Cycle Tramps… From Calderdale

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I received a message this week on the Facebook page from Neola Kay Wilby; “I’ve just been looking at your route for the summer. My boyfriend and I will be cycling from northern Spain to Croatia then to Romania, cross through Germany, Amsterdam and back home! We’re doing it over […]

Welcome To 2013 & The Eurovelo 8

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In exactly 6 months’ time I will be in Athens, or somewhere near Athens. My bike will have been reassembled after its flight from London, my panniers packed with equipment, clothes & supplies & my mind no doubt full of excitement and anxiety as to what the subsequent […]

Eurovelo 8: The Maps

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Digital mapping moves on apace. Only this week I was emailed by a guy from the German website Cycle Routes & Tours pointing out that some of the Eurovelo routes have been mapped on his site. I’ve added the links he gave to the relevant route sections in […]

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Finally, someone has written about cycling the eastern part of the Eurovelo 8 from Greece, through Albania, Montenegro and Croatia. Thanks Ali!