A New Continent

After completing our 7-month motorcycle trip from Colombia to Southern Patagonia in March of 2019 (click here for the South America blog), Brian and I were already talking about where we wanted to go next. Fast forward through four years of working, exploring our new home state of Colorado, isolating from a global pandemic, and moving to Tucson for three months for me to work a travel PT contract to save up some extra money and we found ourselves on a plane headed to Germany! But let me rewind just a little bit…

As the world was slowly returning to post-Covid “normal” in 2022, Brian and I began making plans for a European motorcycle adventure. Unlike in South America where buying a cheap local bike made a lot of sense, Europe is different. As a US citizen without EU residency, it is extremely difficult to register and thus legally drive a European vehicle. Therefore, we needed to figure out a way to ship our motorcycles from the US. All the credit goes to Brian for the planning and logistics, but we ended up going with a company called Knopff Tours that has been shipping bikes between the US and Germany for the past 20+ years. Every spring they collect bikes from three cities across the US and load them onto container ships to sail across the ocean. One of those cities just so happens to be Tucson, so at the end of February we handed over our bikes, crossed our fingers, and off they went!

We were reunited with them in Heidelberg, Germany on April 30th! It was a crazy month of moving, planning, and prepping to get here, but we were buzzing with excitement (and over-caffeination). After a short nap to try and sleep off some of our jet lag, we took to exploring the streets of Heidelberg. Having spent winter in Colorado and Arizona, we were immediately shocked by how green everything was. We strolled along the cobblestone streets next to the Neckar river and climbed up to the base of the Heidelberg Castle. We had our first German beer and schnitzel of the trip before our exhaustion and jet lag caught up with us.

The next couple days were spent preparing the bikes to hit the road. Brian had already done a lot of work on the bikes before we shipped them to Germany, but my Honda had a few issues we needed to resolve. Unfortunately, my exhaust is poorly placed for carrying luggage and it is notorious for burning holes through side panniers (we learned this lesson the hard way on our trip to the Grand Tetons last summer). We spent a lot of time researching workarounds, but didn’t have time to try many of them out before shipping the bikes off. Brian found online that a few other people had success hammering or welding pieces of pipe to deflect the heat, so we ordered the parts to take with us and ended up finding someone to weld them on in Heidelberg. Our solution may not be pretty, but it seems to be working so far!

As much as we liked Heidelberg, we were eager to start riding! After somehow fitting all of the things we brought with us into our motorcycle luggage (just barely), we were off! We spent most of the day riding along the Rhine River, passing picturesque town after picturesque town with countless castles. We frequently found ourselves surrounded by giant fields of bright yellow flowers called rapeseed, which we learned are used to make edible and industrial oils.

We ended up staying in a hotel along the river in a town called Boppard and had some of the best Indian food we have ever had.

The next morning we rode the short ride to the Burge Eltz or Eltz Castle. The Eltz Castle was built in the 11th century and has been owned by the same family for 33 generations. It is one of few castles to remain unscathed by wars. We parked the bikes and walked the 1km to the base of the castle, but decided not to pay for the guided tour as we were anxious to keep riding.

Back on the road, we headed north toward the Nürburgring, a world famous race track that was part of the Formula 1 circuit in the '60s and '70s. These days it’s considered the fastest toll road in the world where anyone with a license is able to drive on the track during tourist season and experience the steep elevation changes and blind corners. We thought better than to do this with overloaded bikes so we settled for lunch at a well-known restaurant offering up an outdoor terrace view of the track and the sounds of cars and motorcycles racing through the circuit.

After lunch, we headed southeast to the beautiful Moselle River and made our way along the river to the town of Trier where we spent the night.

The next day stretched across three different countries (which still blows my mind). After breakfast near our hotel in Trier, Germany we rode across the border into Luxembourg. We had lunch at a cafe in Diekirch and then continued on into Belgium toward Bastogne. We visited the Bastogne War Museum before riding the rest of the way to our hotel on the river in the small town of Waulsort. We spent the evening chatting with the friendly hotel/restaurant owners about their travels and drinking Tripel Karmeliet beer on tap.

The next day we crossed back and forth between France and Belgium as we rode through the forests of the French Ardennes, visited the Chimay monastery where Chimay beer is made, had lunch in the city of Chimay, and continued on to Ghent, Belgium where we were planning to meet up with our friends, Marieke and Uldrik the following day.

Unfortunately, the weather forecasts which predicted rain practically everywhere in Europe for the next 10 days were starting to come true, so we used the following morning to get a workout in. Brian went for a rainy run through the city while I opted to find a local gym.

Later in the afternoon, the rain subsided enough for us to ride over to our friends’ home. We met Uldrik in Marieke in Cartagena, Colombia in 2018. They were traveling South America two-up on a Tenere XT660 and as is often the case with fellow adventure riders, we quickly became friends. We spent four days trekking through the Colombian Andes together, but we hadn’t seen them since 2018. It was great catching up and meeting their two adorable children.

The next morning was still cloudy and cold, but we decided to push on to the D940 Opal Coast road, which is said to be one of the best scenic driving roads in all of France. Sadly, the sun never came out, but we still enjoyed our chilly ride along the English Channel, including a stop at Dunkirk.

Although our plan had been (and still is) to camp a lot on this trip, the weather forecast was looking even worse for the next 24 hours, so we booked a small apartment that was part of a home in a tiny seaside town called Ault. As is usual when we are on the road and don’t know exactly where we will end up, we booked our stay a couple hours before our arrival. We are not sure if our host who came to let us in was more surprised by our arrival or our lack of French, but it was a comical experience that included a demonstration of how to operate every single light switch and appliance in the home. After many laughs and more gesticulations than a game of charades, we wedged the bikes into a tight alley behind the house to keep them out of sight and turned in for the evening.

The following morning, we set off for a three hour ride in the pouring rain to Bayeux, a medieval city in the Normandy region of France. Bayeux is surrounded by history of both medieval Normandy and WWII. We spent the afternoon visiting the American cemetary at Coleville-sur-Mer where over 9,000 U.S. service members are buried, and visiting Omaha beach, the bloodiest of the five D-Day landing sites.

Bayeux proved a perfect place to base ourselves over the next couple of days for short trips to see the various WWII memorials and museums, as well as the 68 meter Tapisserie de Bayeux, an 11th-century tapestry depicting the 1066 Norman invasion of England.

After three days in Bayeux, it was time to move on. The afternoon weather was looking better than expected, so we decided to stop at Mont Saint-Michel, a tidal island with a towering abbey reminiscent of a Disney castle. The island is a popular tourist attraction and it was already crowded by the time we arrived, but we still enjoyed walking through the cobblestone streets and up the stairs through the abbey.

Back on the road, we headed into the Brittany region of France. We spent the evening at a hotel on the Quiberon Peninsula. This area has a vast coastline with gorgeous beaches, but the cold and cloudy weather kept us indoors. At this point, we were hoping to already be riding through the Pyrenees (a mountain range that borders France and Spain), but the weather forecast along the route was showing rain, snow, and temperatures in the 20s and 30s (fahrenheit), so we decided to spend some time on Ile de Rey, a beautiful island off the west coast of France that had a more promising weather forecast. We ended up staying there two nights, riding around the island, climbing up to the top of the lighthouse, relaxing, and trip planning for the next week.

The weather forecast for the Pyrenees was not improving, so we started making alternative plans. The northern region of Spain was on our radar as a plan B, but we were not sure we were going to make it this trip. There is a beautiful mountain range called the Picos de Europa that we had read was excellent for riding and Brian had actually visited about 20 years ago with his family. There appeared to be a small weather window, so we headed west along the northern coast of Spain. We took the A-8 highway, which we both agree is the most beautiful stretch of major highway we have ever ridden. We took the opportunity to hop off the A-8 to ride along the Basque coastline and turned back inland to stop for lunch at Guernica, a town made famous by some awful events in the Spanish Civil War and Picasso’s famous painting by the same name.

Passing through the beautiful rolling green hills of Cantabria, we ended the day in a small town in the Picos called Las Arenas de Cabrales, which set us up perfectly to ride a route called the Potes Triangle the following day. We are so incredibly happy our plans changed, because this ended up being the greatest pavement ride either of us had ever done…but more to come on that in the next blog!

Cheers,

Brian and Erin