by Mark Schanzleh
What happens when you put a Dutch guy and a Canadian girl together? Well, you get the following story…
It all started quite some time ago. I had been in Montreal, Canada for quite a while now, and I was really starting to get a feel for the place. Amelie had also gotten used to having me around in her home town. But we are, and probably always will remain, travelers. And this is how it happened, or actually, how we made it happen…
I had traveled by bicycle before: touring the Netherlands, conquering the sharp rolling hills of New England and completing a tour around the world in about one year, not to mention the thousands of kilometers a year in every day bicycle use in the Netherlands. Amelie had also been on a bicycle before, be it for only a couple of city or country side rides; a minor cultural difference.
My roots being in the Netherlands, and Amelie never having been there, turned out to be an inspiring combination. We decided that it would be cool to travel to my home country, since I would make the perfect tour guide and Amelie would make the perfect tourist. We got excited about the idea and started brainstorming on how we would like to put this trip together. The only problem was that we had insufficient funds to execute our plan. And that’s when we got creative.
We decided that we wanted to visit the Netherlands for at least three weeks and we felt that the best way to visit the Netherlands would be in doing so by bicycle. So we needed money and transportation. Money doesn’t grow on trees, unless you’re an apple farmer, and bikes don’t fall from the sky. So we decided that we should go about this in a semi-professional way. And so we did. Fourteen sponsors, one university and a good cause of our choice later we had created the equicycle-project, www.equicycle.com. We managed to convince the University of Quebec in Montreal to award Amelie a grant to investigate cycle tourism in Switzerland, Germany and, yes, the Netherlands. We also found fourteen money and equipment sponsors in, count them, six weeks (!) and we were able to connect our project to the good cause of Equiterre. Equiterre is a Montreal based not-for-profit organization concerned with the wellbeing of people and our planet. You can imagine how excited we were!
One of the sponsors we managed to find was Dahon. I contacted Dahon because I felt that their foldable bicycles would provide us with an unprecedented mobility. So far, I had always traveled with a mountain bike, rebuilt into a “world traveler” with panniers. Especially on planes, trains and automobiles such a bike is not ideal to carry along because of its sheer size. This time I wanted to do it differently. And Dahon ended up giving us that chance.
The internet is an amazing medium. The things one can do and find there, incredible. I surfed to the Dahon site, to have a look at the possibilities. After having weighed all the ins and outs of the planned trip, my choice ended up being the Dahon Speed Pro, 2006 model. And we have never regretted that choice. The bike gave us the foldable flexibility that we were looking for and comes with 21 gears and all lightweight components. Exactly what we needed for long distance asphalt cycling up and over the Swiss Alps and all the way through Germany and the Netherlands.
Besides a foldable bicycle, we also decided to travel with a trailer behind the bikes, a foldable trailer that is. It took me quite some time to find this one-man, USA based company and to convince him that a sponsorship provided a win-win situation, but it was worth it. Imagine you can travel with your entire luggage in a backpack, your folded bike in your right hand and your folded trailer as a suitcase in your left hand. No messing around with three, four or even six separate bags, not to mention your big unfoldable bike. Yes, for this trip, our equipment definitely did the trick.
And this is how we started our trip. The Dahon bikes in their relatively small, original Dahon boxes, our luggage in a backpack and the trailers folded to the size of a medium suitcase. Everything in the car, on the airport trolley, in the plane and once we were in Paris, all in one Renault Twingo. And for those of you who don’t know this kind of car: it’s about the size of a Mini, but so well laid out that it was able to hold all our equipment including three people, be it in a slightly illegal way. Three people on two front seats is also in France “not done”, even when you are wearing seatbelts.
After a short but pleasant stay in Paris with an old friend we decided to put the foldable capabilities of our bikes to the test once again. And what better way to do this then by taking the TGV (Tres Grande Vitesse) train from Paris to Lyon, in the east of France, at an average speed of 250 kilometers per hour. The bikes fit perfectly into the luggage compartment of the train, and before we knew it we were at the actual starting point of our five-month bicycle trip, Lyon, France. Unfolding the bikes takes less than 30 seconds, unfolding the trailers takes about 5 minutes, so well within ten minutes of our arrival in Lyon we are mobile. Let the adventure commence!
The reason why the University of Quebec in Montreal awarded Amelie the grant is that in return we would be doing a study on cycle tourism in the three countries of our trip: Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands. At our return in Canada we would produce a final report with our findings, thus providing the university, the province of Quebec and Canada with a valuable piece of information to improve cycle tourism within Canada. I guess you could say we provided them with a “bicycle-tool”. So actually this was going to be a working-holiday. Adding another purpose to a few months trip other than just traveling itself is something that we have very much enjoyed. In future travels we aim to do just this.
Finally, we are on the road again! The feeling of the wind on our arms, legs and faces in combination with the sun or the rain on our skin makes cycling one of the most alive ways of traveling. The speed of traveling by bicycle is the perfect speed to not miss anything of what is around you, unlike traveling by car, yet it is fast enough to not get bored with the same landscape hour after hour, as if you were traveling on foot. The added physical component turns cycling into a healthy and very rewarding way of traveling. The knowledge that we contributed zero CO2 to the atmosphere during our 4000 kilometer trip by bicycle is something we regard as a significant bonus.
So where did those 4000 kilometers unfold? Well, after we had left France, we cycled our first stretch in ever so beautiful Switzerland. We were pleasantly surprised by the enormous job that has been done by Veloland Schweiz, the Swiss cycling organization. It has laid out and constructed a well maintained network of regional and national cycling routes throughout the entire country. We crossed Switzerland from the southwest to the northeast in five days following a few of these nation wide constructed routes. Cycling in Switzerland is easy! It is unbelievable that a country which is known for its mountains can be so flat. Of course the Alps were yet to come…
We crossed into Germany by ferry at Lake Konstanz, also known as the Bodensee, to attend to the annual Eurobike fair. As part of our agreement with Dahon we promised to be present at the Dahon stand to share our experiences thus far. Being in Friedrichshafen, the German town where Eurobike is organized, also allowed us to participate in a full day congress about cycle tourism. The subject was right up our alley, and attending this congress put us in a unique position to network. Work during the day, having good times with new made friends at the campground in the evening. We were giving our legs and the bikes a well deserved three days break. Eurobike was an unforgettable happening.
Our legs were warming up again to cycle back into Switzerland, when we decided to make one more stop in Germany, to conduct an interview for our study. This turned out to be a very wise decision for several reasons. Not only did we base one fifth of our study upon this meeting, it also ended with us being invited to spend a full week on board of a luxurious yacht in the Greek Aegean for a sail and bike vacation where we would combine wind power and muscle power to travel in a clean way once again. Who would have said “no, thanks” to this? Of course we accepted, and about one month later we had the time of our life cycling on the Greek islands of Samos, Patmos, Lipsi, Leros and Kos and of course on board the Aegean Clipper.
But before we were going to live this magical experience, we had more kilometers to cycle and more people to meet. From Germany we cycled into Switzerland and on to Basel, Luzerne and Zurich, where we stayed with (new) friends every time. We made very good use of existing online networks for free accommodation worldwide and made many new friends. But friends or no friends, cycling up and over the Swiss Alps is something you have to do yourself, without anybody’s help, so that is what we did. We crossed the Alps from the German speaking part of Switzerland into the Italian speaking part in the south over the Gotthard Pass. Our Speed Pro’s performed excellent during the five hours uphill ride and the one hour decent that followed. With smelly and almost smoking break pads we came to a hold in another world. The area of Lugano, Locarno and Bellinzona doesn’t seem to be Switzerland at all. It’s all so different, so…Italian! When we arrived, the sky went blue, the sun came out and the autumn festival started. Timing is everything.
Going back to the other side of the Alps we did by train. Again our choice to “go foldable” proved to be a good one, and once again we experienced that timing is everything. The road we had climbed to cross the Alps was now covered in snow! One month too early, a thick white blanket of snow turned the mountains into a mystical, but cycle unfriendly environment. The changing climate certainly doesn’t go by unnoticed and even now, as I write this article at the end of 2006, Europe is experiencing extreme weather, warm this time. Did anybody still have any questions about why we were traveling by bike?!?
To make a much longer story significantly shorter: For the next 2500 kilometers we broke in our Speed Pro’s in sun and rain, fog, hail and even snow at temperatures between plus 25 and minus 10 degrees Celsius. We made many more friends, conducted many more interviews and collected much more information. All this ultimately resulted in a report on “cycle tourism in Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands” in both English and French, a nice amount of money to contribute to the good cause of our choice, Equiterre, Amelie seeing the Netherlands as planned with me as her tour guide and an unforgettable experience which would not have come together the way it did without the help of Dahon, all our other sponsors, all our (new made) friends and everyone we interviewed and approached to contribute to our report.
If you are interested in the study we have conducted, you should surf to www.equicycle.com and download the PDF-file of your choice in the Press Releases section. Should you want to read more about our equicycle project, on the same website you can read our Web log and view some of our photos. We hope you were inspired by this article to “go foldable” yourself and live some of the unforgettable experiences that are out there, just waiting to be lived…
We wish you a happy new year and Happy Cycling!
Amelie Racine and Mark Schanzleh.