It's nearly past spring cleaning time and my bike had been due full service for a while. Taking it apart was, okay, not the nightmare I had feared, not hitch free either though. And building it back up has been slow in turn.
North Sea windy weather may be not great for cycling but is great for kite surfing.
Because I had fenders, grips, tires, wires, and the rest actually ordered in advance, lined up, and ready to install, but somehow missed the extra chain tool? Because finding the one took a couple of shots and I had to prioritize differently for a minute? Because why should I ever have expected chain related complications out of nowhere in the first place?
Made Gothenburg Midsummer's Day. Everyone was in a festive mood.
I had a flat last summer at one point in Wrocław (Breslau) as it happens. That same tire had also given me trouble few miles up the Oder outside Opole so I thought best to have someone take a look and replace the inner tube maybe. I asked around and was tipped off to a shop in laid-back tourist-less Nadodrze over the Pomeranian Bridges from Stare Miasto (Old Town) where I was staying.
The whole city has famously many bridges. A photogenic many like the Bridge of Lovers to Cathedral Island and its vintage gas lanterns where another day I saw filming with period costumes and a shiny red MG convertible from the sixties I think.
Getting there The idea is that each picture added unlocks a certain area on the map and then random walkers can be set free at will to bounce back and forth between markers creating abstract 3D figures reflecting their movements.
Lim Fjord was hard work but a fine dip.
The bike shop was up the road from the fluffiest éclair weekends-only best-kept-secret stall and not far from a Kurkowa Street fittingly disguised as Berlin in Bridge of Spies (2015). The bike mechanic confessed to having, I forget, either cycled for or had a hand coaching the Polish Olympic team in the early nineties before declaring that never mind fixing up that tire, a new chain was badly needed in fact.
When in Venice, have a Negroni!
A new chain tight as can be. One that held up nicely later on scaling the Slovenian mountainside and surviving the brake busting dips of Rijeka (Fiume) and Trieste. But one without a master link and without a special connecting rivet. Details… Technicalities…
Like Venice, Grado you have to cycle in and out of.
Good man, he must have overlooked mine was a cruiser not a racing bike being too busy daydreaming about yachting around Pula (Pola) with his buddies sipping whiskey in the sun. That was the holiday chapter he cheerfully spoke among life lessons in coming up with a half hour estimate for how long the job would take, which became an hour plus, which proved to be more like two. It must have been beginning of August already.
Bratislava is less than 50 miles on the Atlantic–Black Sea Route from Vienna. The ruined Esterházy Palace on Kapitulská Street, which Haydn might have known, was closed and set for redevelopment but I had a nice lunch at a nice bar with an ancient well.
By then I had been on the road nine to ten weeks with probably a fortnight hanging out in Berlin and multi-day stops positively in Amsterdam, Bremen, Hamburg, Toruń, Warsaw, and Kraków.
Vienna was hot. Had another flat.
My goal was to follow the Amber Route cycling from the Baltic to the Adriatic. I thought having booked for Coleridge-Taylor's recently unearthed The Atonement at Three Choirs might have prevented me from not observing a schedule but kept making detours anyway. Not until Brno really did I get on EuroVelo 9 and then from Vienna went off script again along the Danube, which was definitely worth it.
Went from Milan to Basel by train and followed the Rhine to Strasbourg before heading home via Nancy, Reims, and Amiens.
October swimming Barafundle Bay was energizing.
Liverpool seen from across the Mersey beginning the governing party's annual conference.
I was back in the UK in September to pick up from Liverpool where I had left it in the spring touring Wales as Storm Amy was about to hit and finally Cornwall from Bristol down to Penzance over Christmas slightly ahead of Storm Goretti.
Had to Running back from Grenen to catch the last train to Frederikshavn to then be catching the last ferry to Gothenburg was very exciting if not pretty. Exact coordinates fall outside the commonly used Natural Earth and other map datasets I tried matching against at first using JPEG EXIF information parsed in JS.
The entire trip I carried a small drone with and never cared to fly it, not when visiting Colossus of Prora most embarrassingly. No fancy angles to show for here therefore. Lacking proper path tracking as well, I wanted to at least make sure I post pictures from every country visited to help work out a full itinerary, which was simple enough to pull off on macOS using the Shortcuts.app and basic AppleScript:
# Runner.scpt
on run argv
set fileList to {}
repeat with p in argv
set end of fileList to POSIX file (p as text)
end repeat
# Quotes required!
tell application "Shortcuts"
run shortcut "Atlas" with input fileList
end tell
end run
Called using:
# Need be online for reverse geocoding lookups. mdfind -onlyin . "kMDItemUserTags=Green && kMDItemKind*='JPEG'" | xargs osascript Runner.scpt > atlas.json
And cross checked along the lines of:
const form = document.querySelector("form")
form?.addEventListener("submit", function onsubmit(e) {
e.preventDefault()
fetch("atlas.json")
.then(r => r.json())
.then((data) => {
// There are bound to be duplicates.
const set = new Set(Object.values(data))
const list = e.target.elements.namedItem("x")
for (const item of list) {
item.checked = set.has(item.value)
}
})
})
// No event is raised with regular `HTMLFormElement.submit()` calls.
form?.requestSubmit()
Lucky to have found a spot on the night train from Budapest to Ljubljana (Laibach) and to have beat the odds of having the bike stolen in Venice because I would have hated overpaying for rental space at the station.
Hell's Mouth, Dead Man's Cove, Land's End… Cornwall was a bit of an uphill battle.
Should be matching:
By now any feeling of accomplishment is gone. A real hero would have swum or walked. Was I ever truly there? Or am I even forgiven to admit that having double and triple checked a fair deal of lengths to and from and of Europe seem to be the same today as they were before leaving the EU? The same as they always have been? Or is that what the problem is then?