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.