This time next year, we'll be Milwyonaires!

If only, I wouldn't have been worrying about the cost of this tour. I shouldn't have though, coz as everyone knows, pensioners are loaded!

Grizzly had asked if I had a rough cost for the tour. I hadn't really. I knew the individual costs for the hotels, from my bookings on Booking.Com but not the total, so I knocked up a spreadsheet. Totalling up all the hotel costs and then the costs for the 'attractions' we plan to visit and factoring in fuel costs, it isn't going to be a particularly cheap holiday. My fuel will be somewhere in the region of £350 on its own. On top of that we will have our subsistence, i.e. beer, dinners, beer, breakfasts, coffees, beer, lunches and snacks. Not to mention the odd beer or three. That, clearly, is an unknown quantity. So as the costs were stacking up, I was beginning to worry that I may be committing my fellow Hogs, particularly my retired chum from the depressed potato growing nation across the Irish sea, to something a bit beyond their means.

As I said though, I shouldn't have worried, as Grizzly has set my mind at rest.  We shan't be blowing a huge wedge in the casino at Monaco but by the same token, we shan't need to doss down with our bikes under any bridges!

The only other worry, is whether Biggsy will be joining us. As mentioned previously, I don't expect an answer on that till the New Year.

With a shade over 200 days to go and the nights soon to start drawing out again, it's downhill all the way now. I plan to help pass the next 6 months by brushing up my language skills, after all we shall be staying in 4 different countries.

I've made a start;

Quatre bieres s'il vous plait.
Vier biere bitte.
Quattro birre per favore.

Once again Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

All Afourd!

Quick update on the tunnel bookings. Dudley has come up trumps today and we now have four crossings booked. All we need to do now is get the fourth hog on board with us. Not expecting any update on that until the new year, so don't expect to hear much from Blogland before that, eh?

In the meantime, Happy Xmas to all and Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers too.

3 out of 4 Hogs...

....say they prefer to book early.

Yes, I've booked the tunnel crossings. Least, I have for three. After some deliberation, I decided to book four crossings, on the basis that if after all the uncertainty, Biggsy does come, I would kick myself if he couldn't get the same crossing and have that screw up the planning I have done for that first day. The decision was helped by knowing that I can always change, actually exchange, the booking for another if not used, so I or Cath & I could take a trip across later in the year, rather than lose the £72 it's costing.

So why only three? It's complicated and quite boring, so to cut it short, I have paid for two, Grizzly has paid for his and I'm waiting for Dudley to pay for his, then we are all sorted. Once Dudley is booked we can pretty much put our feet up and wait for summer to arrive.

I'll still be fine tuning the itinerary but essentially we are ready to rock 'n' roll.




This'll be the Wild Hogs come July 6th 2014

There's more than one tour in France next July?

Howdy y'all.

I know, I know, it's been a while and you have all been on tenterhooks waiting for the next instalment. Well here it is.

Firstly, the good news. I have been waiting for the Tour de France dates/route to be announced, so I could check the route against our own. I was worried after all that planning, that I may have to re-route us to avoid all those lycra clad maniacs on bicycles. It was known quite a while back that it kicks off in the UK, oop that Yorkshire like but the rest of the tour route, through France, was a closely guarded secret.......until recently.

I've, checked the route today and, as I said, it's good news. The Hogs and I shall be about 3 days ahead of the TdF, even with our little excursion into Germany and Italy and in any case, our paths would only cross once, in Nimes, in the south. So, unless the authorities are planning on closing roads 3 days in advance, we shall be totally unaffected by the cycling, save for having it rammed down our throats on TV every evening, I suspect!

Not such good news, is that we still don't know if we shall be 3 or 4 Hogs on this trip. Biggsy is busy doing up his house with a view to selling it and at time of writing, is still unable to commit to coming with us. We understand his position and hope he achieves a quick sale in the new year but as Eurotunnel are now taking bookings for July crossings, I think I am going to have to  book for 3 and hope that if he does decide to join us, he can get his bike on the same crossing. If we weren't travelling at high season, I might be able to wait a while but these things are always better booked. A bit like football, it's better to have the points in the bag, rather than the game in hand, if you get my drift? Fingers crossed, we are a four come July.

Our 8th day of the tour sees us lodging for the night by Lake Garda in Italy. That also happens to be the night of the World Cup Final. That could be quite an atmosphere if Italy are in the final, though I'm not sure of the time difference, so we may all be tucked up in bed when the game is played. Might not be such fun if England beat them though ;-)

That's all for now. There'll be another update when I have the channel crossing sorted.

More Hotel Shenanigans

Taking a look at the hotel bookings my eye was drawn to one in Germany. When I'd first booked it, it had some ridiculous price quoted, because the lady at Booking.com told me, they hadn't finalised the room price. She told me the correct price would be, a hefty £70 each. Now looking down the list, as I said my eye was drawn to that figure and so I decided to see if there was any way to get the price down. Hey presto! I was able to book 4 more rooms, this time at £40, which is much more like it and cancel the original booking. It doesn't always pay to jump in early but you can't blame me, given quite a number of the hotels I'd originally identified, were fully booked before I even got a sniff of them on B.com. Anyway, all's well..... I double checked the other hotels too but they were still the price as originally booked.

Moving on, and looking at the itinerary, I was trying to get some idea of what train we would need to catch on that first morning. So, working back from our various stops, I have determined that we shall need to be on the 8:20, which pretty much means a 6:30 start for me, picking the Hogs up at 6:45 for the run to Le Tunnel.

During this exercise I was checking the opening times and cost of the Hill 62 trenches, our first stop on the other side. It was at this point that I came across and read some reviews on Trip Advisor. I can normally take these with a pinch of salt, for every good review, someone will hate the same thing. Here though, I was finding bad review after bad review. It seems that the place is a bit of a rip-off and not very well looked after. It was hard to ignore the number of very similar reviews, so I decided to have another look round and came across some German trenches instead, that seem altogether better looked after and even take a few miles off the day's riding. I have, therefore, re-routed us to visit these instead.

Moving on to the second day, we have a visit to the Maginot Line fort at Hackenberg. Least that was the plan. Reading the website though, it wasn't entirely clear if the place was open outside of the weekend. With us arriving on a Monday, that could be a massive planning faux pas. Clarification was needed and so I emailed the address on the website and asked them when they are open. The answer came back today that they will be open on the Monday in question, from 14:30. I'm still not clear if that is the opening time or the time for a guided tour, as those are mentioned on the website but for now I'm happy that the plan stands and my planned timings should see us arrive by 14:00.

I'll be undertaking a similar exercise for the other places we plan to visit. There's little point in arriving at a venue shortly before it closes, if getting on the road an hour earlier would make all the difference, so it's a worthwhile exercise in my book. I know the Hogs will be happy with whatever I decide. They are just grateful it is me doing all this and all they have to do is turn up and ride.....Oh and pay of course!

Less than 300 days now. It'll soon pass!

Hotel Madness

So for a while there, I had three separate hotels booked for the same nights and was looking at a fourth!  I think I must be addicted to Booking.com!

Cath put me onto one along New Road in Chatham, which seems to tick all the boxes pretty much. It is cheaper than one near me and although two quid per room, per night more than the Premier Inn, comes with a full English brekkie. Not only is it closer to my place than the afore mentioned Premier Inn but is also in walking distance of Cath's but more importantly, the venue for our pre tour welcome dinner. For that I am planning to hit a Chinese 'eat as much as you like' venue. The food is all cooked to order there and the service is very good too, all for fifteen quid. If we are lucky we may get some Saturday night entertainment thrown in too. Like most of this stuff, that though is a long way off and I expect some of you are wondering why I am writing all this with 300 days still to go. You may have a point! Things will probably go fairly quiet over the winter though, so you should make sure you enjoy every morsel while you can.

I digress, I'm not finished with hotels yet.  As I booked the one in Chatham, I cancelled the expensive one near me. And then I had a thought. One of those I'd booked in Germany was quite expensive. I wondered if it might be any cheaper now. Ha,ha!  Cheaper, each room was thirty quid cheaper, so I hastily booked another four rooms and cancelled the existing booking. The Hogs will thank me for that, more money for some tasty weissbier!!

I might take a look at some of the others too, though maybe I should concentrate on something else for a while. We'll see ;-)

Re-routed

OK, I've completed the review of the route and re-jigged fuel stops where necessary. The upshot is, there are only 2, maybe 3 days when we shall have to jump on some multi lane roads, days when we have somewhere to visit, so can't afford to dawdle. Even then, I think they are ones in France, that are only 2 lane. In fact, the widest road we'll be on will be the M20 on the run to/from the channel tunnel, before we even get on the continent. 

In mileage, I think there is an extra 30-40 on the twisty stuff. Time wise though, we are looking at an additional 25 hours riding time, over the entire tour. I must say though, now I've had a closer look, some of those roads should be a real hoot to ride on and so long as the sun is shining, who cares if it takes a little longer. We can always get Tomtom to re-route us if we feel the need to speed up anyway.

In undertaking this little exercise, I've managed to pull us away from service station fuel and, in France particularly, steer us towards supermarket fuel. That should save us a few euros over the course of a few fill-ups and leave us more towards our own liquid intake ;-)

I've also booked some hotel rooms for before and after the tour, at the moment too many, of differing quality and cost. Better to have these things sorted early, even though leaving it later and not paying the cancellation premium, would save money. Once things are a bit more firmed up and by that I mean the numbers of Hogs travelling, I can maybe look to cut the costs a bit more.

I did it M way

OK, I've revisited the routes briefly The TYRE software only has a global setting for avoiding motorways so I've had to toggle that off and on to see the affect on mileage and duration. No surprise on timings, one is amost double but some mileages are actually less.

Further investigation required but I don't think we'll have any major issues or replanning.

Nobody's Fuel

Don't know what I was worried about. I've managed to identify fuel stops for the entire tour already, though I might revisit it to see if there is anything more suitable.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on which way you look at it, I discovered that Via Michelin maps have a friendly little petrol pump symbol, which when clicked shows them all on the map. Unfortunately because, I'd already done two thirds by my tried and trusted method of scouring Google maps for service areas on the big roads or for buildings that looked petrol station like on the smaller ones. Easier when GM shows a little petrol pump but it is by no means as comprehensive as VM.

One thing that became quite apparent though during this exercise, is the number of major roads, that's motorways or dual carriageways the route is taking. I'm not sure now whether this was something I was previously aware of but I may duplicate the route maps to see what we get when motorways are omitted.

There are a lot of very decent single lane roads on our route and I think it unfeasible to expect to avoid all motorways but the other Hogs are somewhat uneasy with multi lane roads, so I'll take another look at maybe offering a better balance and try smaller roads that run close to the existing route. The issue with the smaller roads though, as we found out on the Reservoir Hogs Tour in 2012, is that even on motorcycles it can be difficult to pass and we don't really want to spent our riding days stuck behind farmer Jules or the European's favourite, the white camper van. Not such a problem if we are just riding A to B but with places to visit, time saved on the road, is time we can spend at the 'attraction'.

I'll let you know how I get on with that.

Meanwhile, it struck me that when the Hogs come to town, they're gonna need somewhere to stay, I just don't have the room in my little flat for three additional bodies and gear, so I've booked a hotel just up the road.

Finally for now, there's a bit of a question mark over whether we shall be four or just three Hogs on this tour. Biggsy is doing up his house at the moment and all his spare cash is being ploughed into the property, so as yet he is unable to commit to coming. We're all hoping that he can, as the four of us had such a great time last year. He's got some time to make his mind up, I shan't be looking to book the Eurotunnel crossings until the new year. Fingers crossed.

Keeping the show on the road

That means, finding regular watering holes for our steeds. As with the Reservoir Hogs Tour of 2012, I shall be looking to stop for fill ups around every 150 miles. Dudley's Harley only has a tiny peanut style tank, so we are restricted to what he can do on a tank full. I'm not too sure about the other two Hogs but, as those who have followed the Ashes Tour blog will know, I can easily get 200 out of the Sprint. For me then it'll be a case of little and often!

I've started to take a look and already this looks like being a task as equally difficult as getting the accommodation, more so in fact. So far all I am certain of, is that we can fill up at the services by junction 11 of the M20, just before we board the shuttle. After that, I think we are looking at somewhere close to our overnight stop in Waterloo.

I have a couple of apps on my phone, for Shell and BP but not sure whether they will work overseas. I doubt we'd see many, if any, BP stations anyway, so I may have to search for something for Esso and some of the foreign brands.

This should keep me busy over the coming weeks/months!

Call me thick......

but all from the very start of this tour, through the planning process, the opening of the blog, sorting the route, etc, etc, it never entered my head, that next year is the 100th anniversary of the First World War.  Not until my brother Paul mentioned he was planning a memorial trip over to Corbie, near Amiens, in the Somme region of France, to pay his respects to one of the Devall fallen, had I given it a thought.

Having given it thought though, the mind has cranked into overdrive (slight exaggeration maybe) and I have, with the blessing of my fellow Hogs, amended our route slightly, so I too can pay my respects to, not one but two Devalls, unlucky enough to lose their lives fighting for King and Country in the Great War.

Seems quite ridiculous that I never thought of this before, so thanks to Paul for sowing the seed. As Dudley put it, it is the 'wholly appropriate' thing to do.

Lest we Forget!

All booked

A bit easier when the month you want to book shows up on the website. All hotels are now booked. There are quite a few changes from the original list, meaning we shan't now get to stay in our German castle :-( Moving hotels, quite some distance in some cases, has necessitated some re-planning of the route but distances, apart from one day I think, remain about the same. The Hogs will just have to ride a bit faster and further, eh?

I'm quite excited looking at some of the roads we'll be travelling on. Plenty of twists and turns to get the knees down!

We shall be running through some pretty spectacular scenery and some of the hotels look quite 'interesting' too. 

Roll on next July.

5 left to book

Have managed to get a few more hotels booked today, including one I particularly liked the look of, a farmhouse near Le Mans, run/owned by an English couple. Booking.com had said no vacancies but I took the chance and emailed. The lady, Tina, came back to me to say we could have the annexe, that has its own entrance and twin en-suite bedrooms. They even do an evening meal with complimentary wine. Result!  Hoping that I can get the others booked up tomorrow, once we get into August and hopefully, they will start to appear on the website that far ahead.

And a couple more.

This is proving to be much more difficult than I'd imagined. Many of my first choice hotels are already showing as booked, for the dates I've chosen, so I'm getting a little frustrated. I managed to get another couple booked last night but the route/distances are changing accordingly. Maybe we should be camping instead!


Sent from Samsung Mobile

And then there were 6

Quite by chance, I discovered that using the Booking.com app on my phone, I could actually see room availability for July next year. Wasting no time, I have managed to book another 5 hotels, though two are not the originals I had identified. Whether they are fully booked or just don't accept bookings that far ahead, I'm still not sure but I will check them out on the PC, as we move into August. The beauty of B.com is that you have free cancellation on these places, so if I change my mind or find something different/better, it's a simple task to cancel, without it costing me/us anything.

The planning was hard enough but having to rethink because of lack of accommodation, is a real pain. It doesn't help that hotels with twin rooms seem to be in the minority. Now don't get me wrong, I am more than comfortable with my own sexuality and I love these guys but I don't really want to be spooning with them in a series of double beds the entire tour!

One of the worst places I've found for availability and twin rooms, is the South Tyrol. It's been so hard to find anything, I have considered staying (and booked a hotel) in Innsbruck. It would make that day fairly short and the next subsequently longer but not massively. It might even give us time to do some sightseeing in Innsbruck, rather than just riding through/around. Alternatively, there is the option to ride further the first day and then have time to relax by Lake Garda by arriving earlyish the next.

Whatever I decide, I know the Hogs will be right behind me....not in bed though, eh!

First Hotel Booked

Most of my chosen hotels for this trip have been sourced on Booking.com. At the moment though, I can only book up to June 2014 with them. However, for our overnighter in Munich, we shall be staying in an Ibis hotel and I have been able to book the rooms there, this evening. I'm hoping to get the others all done asap on 1st August, when, I'm assuming, the booking.com website will open up bookings for July. 

Welcome

Welcome one and all to this, my latest biking blog. You will, by now, have realised that my, or should I say, our next tour, is going to be on the continent. For most it will involve riding through 6 countries. For Grizzly, our foreign Hog, coming from Ireland, there will be 2 extra, Wales and England.

On this tour, we shall traverse mainland Europe from France, into Belgium, through Luxembourg, back into France, into Germany, through Austria, into Italy and finally back into France.

The theme we have chosen or should that be, I have chosen for this tour, is a serious and thought provoking one, War! In keeping with our penchant for linking the tour themes with film titles (ref: Reservoir Hogs in 2012), this tour will be known as, The Hogs of War Tour.

Though primarily covering the Great and Second World Wars, we shall go back even further in time with a visit to the battlefield at Waterloo. We shall be visiting cemeteries, trenches, a Maginot Line fort, the site of a Nazi concentration camp, D-day beaches, a V2 rocket site and a town whose population was almost entirely wiped out by German troops. As I said, serious and thought provoking.

On a lighter side, as we ride through Germany, we shall be taking in part of the famous and I understand very beautiful, Castle Route, even staying in one overnight. In Munich, we shall, I shouldn't wonder, partake of the odd stein of beer and some German sausage! As the hills come alive through Austria into Italy, we shall relax by Lake Garda and visit the homes of two of the most famous names in Italian automotive engineering, Ferrari and Ducati. Further on, we shall marvel, no doubt, at the Leaning Tower of Pisa and maybe, risk everything on red, in the casino at Monaco, before heading up through France to the places where so many lost their lives in the fight for freedom, less than a lifetime ago.

19 days and 2700 miles is the plan and I'm hoping that many of you will want to follow us on our travels, so don't forget to sign up for email updates.

Get your tin hats ready, it's gonna be a blast!