25th June to 1st August 2025
Preamble for trip
A quick summary of our plans.
A seven day boat/bike trip down the Upper Rhine from Strasbourg to Mainz with eight “motley crew” friends.
A weekend stop outside of Amsterdam with Aussie friends Alison and Ads.
Seven day boat trip around the canals of the Netherlands with our good UK boating friends Wolfgang and Marlene on their boat “Old Gilly”.
Down to Frankfurt for a five day bike ride along the Mein River with our good friends Horst and Elfi.
Lastly a week in Paris doing the highlights and our good friend Karen from London joining us for a few days.
More Detail
Our five week trip involves a lot of catching up with friends who not only live in Europe and the United Kingdom but also friends from Australia and the United States who will be joining in with us.
We will travel from Calgary to Paris where we will board a train to Strasbourg which is east of Paris on the French/German border.
But let us go back a little. When we leave Calgary we will have friends Gabby and Linda from Phoenix leaving our apartment with us as they will have been visiting with us for a few days. They will have just completed a long road trip from Phoenix up to the northwest coast of the US and then across to Calgary. We go directly to Paris whereas they will fly to the US and then to Stuttgart and then train to Strasbourg…..but, we need to go back again. They will meet other friends of ours Randa and Neal who are from Montana, but via Phoenix, at Stuttgart. Randa and Neal will have flown from Phoenix to Stuttgart. Linda, Gabby, Randa, Neal and us all know one another from the +55 community that we have been frequenting in Phoenix for the last two northern hemisphere winters.
But there is more!!! When we get to Strasbourg, we will meet up with our very old and dear friends Al and Jen from Perth, Western Australia.
You are probably wondering why all this very fine but boring detail. Our blog is our journal of our travels and we are finding that unless we record all our finer details we forget who joined us when and where and how it all came about.
The day after we arrive in Strasbourg, Gabby, Linda, Neal and Randa will me up with Al, Jen and us and introductions will happen. So this is the eight “bum ready” bikers who will be heading down the Upper Rhine from Strasbourg to Mainz over seven days covering approximately 160k’s.
All going well and providing all of us arrive safely in Mainz we will all split off and go our separate ways. Jen and Al to Berlin to meet up with their daughter who has flown over from San Francisco to join them for a holiday; Neal, Randa, Gabby and Linda will drive to central Switzerland to the Jungfrau for some mountain hiking. We will train to Hilversum in the Netherlands for a weekend of R&R with Al and Ads and spend the time chewing the cud and taking Brontë their gorgeous dog for walks on the Haida.
We then (somehow/somewhere) join up with Wolfgang and Marlene on their Dutch Cruiser in the Amsterdam region to spend a week cruising the Dutch waterways. Marlene and Wolfgang date back to our 2016 four month trip on the canals in the UK. We have met up numerous times cruising in Wales, Scotland and the UK and also visiting them in Northern Germany.
Following, what we know will be a wonderful time with a lot of laughter and probably lots of lost in translation moments, we will then make our way down to our friends Horst and Elfi who live in Aschaffenburg.
We met Horst and Elfi in 2000 when we were walking the Milford Track in New Zealand. We have visited them numerous times in Germany and have done some very memorable trips in the UK, Canada and Germany over the years.
This time, Horst has organised a five day bike ride down the Mein Canal from Bamburg to Wurzburg. The beauty of this trip is that neither Horst or Elfi have done it before and hence we will be visiting many small villages en-route that will be new to them.
Following a few days of R&R back at their home in Aschaffenburg after we have completed the bike ride, we will head to Gai Pari by train.
We have four long train journeys on this trip which for us are always such a delight as we are train buffs. Our time in Gai Pari is organised down to the minute as now being a tourist is about being competitive and combative. Due to maddening crowds, there is no longer any spontaneity and let us see where the moment takes us or come to that, what havoc the weather brings. Come hell, rain, smoke or high water, if you have managed to secure a ticket up the Eiffel Tower…..you bloody well go. To get the tickets up the Eiffel Tower, we practised for two weeks on the official booking site to learn how to beat the bots – and that we did!!! Gone are the days when tourism meant freedom. Luckily for us, it is the final week of our holiday. We have our good friend Karen from London joining us for three days where we will visit Versailles Palace and hopefully get to see the restored Norte Dame Cathedral.
So that winds up our European Trip for 2025. We return to Canada 🇨🇦 to commence selling apartment, car and chattels and making our way back DownUnder to restart our lives after 22 amazing years living in this beautiful country. It is truly a bittersweet time for us. This trip sees us saying farewell to a lot of our northern hemisphere friends for a time….but….as they know, we are the proverbial boomerangs.🪃
Rowkin Rovings Blog 