And here you go….
Grand Total of 2542.2km (1576.16 miles)

Well, I saw some comments regarding where I was and if I took my adapters and all that stuff. I can assure you that I took them. It was very difficult to get online in Europe. I either couldn’t do it, or it was very expensive, or it was expensive and only on their computers. I don’t do public access computers because I know what people can do with them (security concerns).

I may repeat myself here a bit, as you read further below, but I still have a lot of thoughts running around inside my head about the trip. I can’t remember specifically what I wrote or didn’t write and aside from trying to edit my writing for errors I don’t want to change what I was thinking at the time I wrote it.

Since I wasn’t able to get online I made an effort to post the trip in “reverse” order….meaning you can read it from top to bottom instead of bottom to top as it would have come out were I to post every day.

If you want to see more pictures than I am including in the blog go to my photos site at http://photos.yahoo.com/apriliarider@sbcglobal.net I highly recommend this as you will miss a ton of good photos if you don't.

All of that aside, the trip was absolutely awesome!! I would do it again in a heartbeat. Maybe next year or the year after I’ll take another tour. The Edelweiss folks were great and made touring Europe and awesome experience. I almost couldn’t imagine doing it any other way. We met groups that were on busses and had been doing the standard tourist thing for two weeks. Two weeks on a bus seeing the regular tourist crap….are you high?

I needed the break from work. When on the bike I wasn’t able to think about much else. Sure, my thoughts wandered around a bit, but I didn’t think about work or anything else that was stressful too much. I even forgot what day and date it was. I didn’t wear a watch when I was riding. If the bike didn’t have a clock on it I wouldn’t have known what time it was….half the time, I didn’t anyway.

Everyone in Europe was very friendly. Except, as you can probably guess, the French. That was probably my least favorite country with Germany and Austria being my two favorites. The people and the culture are indescribable.

About the only major complaint I have is that we just didn’t have quite enough time to experience the towns as much as I wanted. Now, this is not to say that I wouldn’t do this again, but if you had to have something negative that’s it. For the most part I rode the longer routes every day. That meant that we were clutch-out (moving) by 9:00am and riding all day (sometimes 10 hours) to get to where we were going. Then we’d have some beers, shower (sometimes not!) and eat dinner. At that point everything would be closed so we’d have more beers and then repeat the process the next day. Only a few times did we get to walk around much and check out the towns. Sure, I could have elected to not ride on my rest days, but was there ever really any choice?

My trip was also a bit of a personal journey. See, for those of you that don’t know me I am pretty anal. I like to be spontaneous and have fun, but I also like some order to my chaos and disorganization. Journeying to Europe on my own to ride a bike across various countries was both very exciting and a little bit intimidating. I had to get beyond some of my own reservations about a trip like this to make it work. And let me tell you, I loved just about every minute of it.

For those that were asking, the answer is “no” I didn’t hook up with any German cuties. I obviously made it back to the U.S. didn’t I? I will say that the women in Germany, Switzerland and Austria are all very attractive. It reminded me of being in Montana…but not Texas. Why? Well, for the most part the Europeans are all very fit and have that “outdoor” look that I like. In Texas we sit around in the A.C. and eat fried Twinkies while watching the Jerry Springer show (at least that is the stereotype).

Again, I am glad to be home….. don’t fly Air Canada (the most convoluted F’d up airlines ever), if you are up for it then take a ride with these folks and see some of the world. You will be glad that you did.