A Bike Journey

We spent a full 12 days in Istanbul, our longest break by far on our trip to date. We had quite a few visitors: First, Janna and Marco came out from London, then Freddie’s dad popped over for a short visit from Germany, and finally Gerry came over from London as well to spend a few days with us. It was really fantastic to catch up with friends and family again, it gave us a real mental break. We also enjoyed our last few days with Di before she went home to the UK, having finished her London – Istanbul…

When we left the UK, we were a little apprehensive about how we would cope with our bike trip. We had dreamed about cycling to Australia for a while, but then Freddie got a joint inflammation in her back. After many months of fruitless physio treatments, she finally had a cortisone injection a couple of weeks before we set off on our trip. Nobody knew at the time if it would really fix the problem. We set off towards Dover anyway, not knowing if we would make it past France. Luckily the injection worked like a dream and so…

Shortly after leaving Vize, we saw our first touring cyclists since we left the Danube. They were two young Swiss guys who were cycling about 50km apart from each other as they had had a barney in Istanbul and decided to split up. They were on their way to Romania, so we were able to give them some route advice. Mid morning, we pulled into a small village to have a short break. Outside of the villages there was not much shade to rest in, so we found a quiet, shaded corner in the village to drink something cold…

Posted a few days later due to lack of internet access. We have made it into Istanbul this morning – more on that later. Wow. Our first day cycling in Turkey has been amazing. After spending 4 nights in Edirne to allow Freddie to recover from her tummy bug, we finally hit the road yesterday. Edirne is a lovely town with a very European feel and some interesting mosques, but the hotels are expensive and after a few days we had kind of exhausted its entertainment options.|| Many cyclists take the infamous D100 into…