How to bodge

This is not the major expedition Luke would like to think it is. In an effort to make it a more adventurous proposition, he has stayed true to form by being cheap and bodging things together. Despite his best efforts though, it should all stand up to the task of crossing a continent.

If you are considering a trip of this sort, this is what you should buy:

http://www.thorncycles.co.uk/enlargeravenadventure.html

and one of these too:

www.bobgear.com/trailers/

If anyone fancies buying us this stuff, grand; for the moment we've got an old Dawes Galaxy Tandem (state of the art in the mid 80s, when ours was built, and they're still building them) and a big old cargo trailer like this

(off ebay) which we rode round for a while before Luke borrowed Iain's angle grinder and took off all the unnecessarily heavy bits.

Stop press. 15th August.

Luke has to eat humble pie. The trailer might well have made it, but he crashed it into the curb, flipped it over and then made Sophie cycle 90km with one wheel on the wonk. His ideals of cycling across Europe on a shoestring have been shattered.

Undettered, our heroes tracked down a shop in Cologne that sells BOB trailers, and went for the (marginally) cheaper one than that indicated above. Luke supposes that the moral of the story is: gear is good, buy the best you can afford. Sorry.

Kit test

Our only training, possibly our only advance attempt at a bike ride with the full kit set-up...

Last weekend we pedalled up to the North Norfolk coast and dusted off the tent to join friends for the night at Stiffkey campsite. All good so far (once we fixed the flagpole)!

Preliminaries

View Tandem to Istanbul in a larger map

This is the route we are likely to follow. We're intending to depart on Sunday the 2nd August.

There will be a party at a mystery (but predictable) Golden Triangle public house on Sat the 1st and Soph has proposed a York Tavern roast lunch on the Sunday, followed by a glorious departure from the fine city.

Anyone wishing to share in the glory would be very welcome to accompany us by bike out of Norwich on our route as far as they fancy. We shall be heading out of the city on National Cycleroute no1 (via Whitlingham) towards Harwich and the ferry to Holland.

We are very excited.