In September 2020 we cycled 3,079km (with 20,754m elevation gain) from Barcelona to London. It was a truly pleasurable trip compared to Norway Cycle Tour 2018. We treated ourselves to coffee and pastries almost daily, a hotel weekly, and gorged ourselves on the bountiful, cheap, and high quality foods of Europe. We passed through Spain, France, Monaco, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Luxembourg, and Belgium. We were then ahead of schedule so made a few 100km detour to Amsterdam before returning to Calais to catch the ferry across the English Channel. Coronavirus restrictions made this more difficult than otherwise, but we successfully navigated all the regional restrictions. See our daily posts below or see all our photos as we go on Flickr in our Flickr Album
On this cycle tour we will used bikepacking bags, unlike Norway Cycle Tour 2018, where we used traditional panniers. We drove straight into it, without much practice, so learned quickly about the quirks of all the velcro and bags. Subscribe by email to follow along on our future trips!
Our original rough itinerary was to join two Eurovelo routes – Eurovelo 5 and Eurovelo 8. We took Eurovelo 5, the “Mediterranean Route” from Barcelona to near Pavia (Italy) and then connected on to Eurovelo 8, the “Via Romea” from near Pavia to London. Some of the route has still not been developed (the least developed being Spain and Italy), so we had some routefinding challenges along the way, which were often solved by Strava heatmaps based routing!
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