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We have crossed Canada by bike in 2015 & 2017.  Now is the time to tackle some European countries.  We have 3 months to cycle from Amsterdam to Istanbul.  We will arrive in Amsterdam on March 27 2025 and we leave Istanbul on June 30 2025.

About Us

We (Daniel & Hélène) are an old new couple who met through cycling.  We have been together since June 2012 and tied the knot in March 2022.  We started touring in 2013 and did two long trips that took us across Canada.

2015: Canada Vancouver (BC) to Ottawa (ON) 5,353 km

2017: Canada Ottawa (ON) to St-John's (NL) 3,369 km

In January 2018, we took up Fat biking which led to mountain biking, the eventual sale of our VW Westfalia and in 2020 the purchase of a Class B RV to haul said mountain bikes. For 2 years, we travelled to mountain biking sites in the VW and used campgrounds. In 2020, COVID-19 restrictions closed common areas in campgrounds and made them unaccessible unless you had a "self-contained RV" and the VW was not. 

By 2023, we asked ourselves what to do with all of our bike touring equipment since we were so heavily engaged in the mountain bike "scene". We decided to give bike touring another try by cycling from Ottawa to Sainte-Perpetue, Quebec (860 km round-trip) and join friends at "La Petite Aventure 2023", a 3-day family oriented cycling event. We all remember June/July 2023, as the summer of western wild fires and the crushing heat. We could not have picked a worst time to give bike touring another go. Outcome after 7 days of touring, to quote a recently retired prime minister: "We're back!"

Okay where do we go? Back in 2015, we had considered cycling from Prudhoe Bay, AKA to Victoria, BC later changed to Tuktoyaktuk, NWT to Victoria, BC but decided that I (Daniel) was not up to the challenge. Still on the To-Do list but with the RV. I was in Istanbul 14 years ago and tried to rent a bicycle without success.

I googled "Europe, Istanbul" and came up with all sorts of itineraries offered by bicycle travel companies. We settled on a London-Istanbul route. Having experienced the brutal heat in 2023, we decided that an early spring start would be best. We fat bike at -18 C, so near 0 C would be okay. We followed a family of friends on a year long bike ride that started in London, England and they had some pretty challenging terrain in the first week. Our route to the ferry from London to the coast would have been somewhat unpleasant just off the plane. We decided to start somewhere nearly flat and Amsterdam fit the bill. 

With more googling, I stumbled on the "Sultan's Trail" which is a walking/cycling route from Vienna to Istanbul. We decided that our route would consist of EuroVelo trails to Vienna and then the Sultans Trail.  

     

Hélène: 59 years old and retired and got into cycling back in 2008 and the rest is history.  

Daniel: 68 years old and retired, former Harley rider who got into cycling back in 2007 because he was not going to pay $1.50 per litre to gas his hawg and the rest is history.  

Daniel will write the vast majority of the blog, thanks to the technical work Hélène did to make it easy peasy for him to do. Hélène will continue to provide technical and editorial support.