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Newsletter 1988: Cycling in East and West Europe PDF Printable Version

ANNUAL NEWSLETTER 1988

CYCLING IN PORTUGAL, FRANCE & EASTERN EUROPE

Barry and Margaret Williamson

The annual newsletter for 1988 describes cycle rides in Portugal, France and behind what was then the Iron Curtain. In the summer we rode through Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, flying back to the UK from Vienna.

EASTER IN PORTUGAL: The first major ride of the year was two weeks and 650 miles in Portugal at Easter, a clockwise circular tour starting and ending in Faro, which we reached via a charter flight from Manchester. We stayed in Pensions, small hotels and the occasional private house and cycled the full length of the southern coast of Portugal (the Algarve) as well as going north to the marble towns of Estremos, Borba and Vila Vicosa. Highlights of the ride included visiting Cape Saint Vincent, the south-west corner of Europe where Prince Henry the Navigator had his school (pupils included Vasco de Gama and Magellan); cycling across the rolling hills and cork forests of the Alentejo and crossing a river near the Portuguese/Spanish border by rowing boat, when a bridge promised by the map failed to materialise.

EARLY SUMMER IN FRANCE, COAST TO COAST: In June we were both able to get away to ride 1,200 miles in four weeks, diagonally across the heart of France from Roscoff on the North West coast of Brittany to Perpignan on the Mediterranean and then over the Pyrenees into Spain and down the Costa Brava to Barcelona, from where we flew to Manchester. Cycling and camping, the route crossed Brittany to the Loire at Angers, along the Loire to Tours and then followed the Cher to Montlucon. From there we headed south across the high plateau of the Massif Central and the gorges of the Lot, the Tarn and the Dordogne and thence to the Mediterranean. In Spain, we gave up on the Costa Brava after a couple of days and headed inland, into the mountains around Vic and into Barcelona through the back door via the spectacular monastery of Montserrat.

SUMMER IN EASTERN EUROPE: Our main ride however was in the summer (July/August) and it took us to Eastern Europe – our first time behind the Iron Curtain. We spent six weeks camping and cycling the 2,200 mile route. We started from Hull, taking the North Sea Ferry to the Hook of Holland and from there we rode across Holland (and Belgium briefly) into Western Germany and down to the Rhine near Bonn. We followed the Rhine to Koblenz and on past the Lorelei to Mainz, where we followed the Main to Wertheim and so into the Tauber Valley and the Romantische Strasse. From Rothenburg we went across country to Nuremberg and then to Waidhaus on the Czechoslovakian border which we reached eleven days after leaving Rotterdam. Once across the border, we went via Pilsen to Prague and then for 600 miles east along the northern edge of Czechoslovakia (seeing Poland a couple of times and spending a day in the Tatra Mountains) to the Russian border. By this time we had been riding east for four weeks but we had then to turn south and drop down into Hungary, crossing the Czech/Hungarian border at Satoraljaujhely.

We went east again for a couple of days to the Russian and then the Romanian border, before having to turn west to reach Budapest via the eastern end of the Great Hungarian Plain and then the mountains of Northern Hungary. We followed the Danube from Budapest to Vienna, where we took a flight to Luton and thence Huddersfield and into work the next day! The memories of this journey are still too rich and varied and numerous to be easily analysed, but outstanding were the villages of the Plains of Hungary: a haunting atmosphere, a medieval setting and storks on every lamp-post!