You can navigate through these pages by clicking on the links in the green bars.

intro	is this page.
diary	is an account of the trip which I wrote whilst travelling, augmented with photographs. The times of the entries are probably a little wayward, since they're derived from the times the messages were sent and could be in UK time, Central European time, some other timezone, or even completely made up.
route	describes the route I took, and gives some hints about the route I should have taken. Hopefully anyone else trying a similar trip will find it useful.
gear	gives a list of the equipment I took, and also describes how I kept the online diary during the trip.

This trip was really all brought about by the current turbulence in the technology business. A friend of mine, Joe Newman, was made redundant by the closure of the AT&T research lab in Cambridge, and moved to the Technical University of Vienna to carry on his research. One of his motivations for moving to Vienna was the quality of mountain biking, and other outdoor sports, available very close to the city. He invited a number of friends from Cambridge to go and visit and sample the mountains first hand, and I willingly accepted, thinking of getting cheap flights there and back for the weekend.

Shortly afterwards, I found that things in my own job weren't going my way and decided to take some time out: now is as good a time as any not to be in the technology industry. Having suddenly got time on my hands, flying to Vienna seemed like cheating: why not try and cycle all the way? A quick bit of route planning revealed that it was about 800 miles from Calais to Vienna via major roads. I'd got a two-week gap between other events in which to do the trip. Would it be possible? There was only one way to find out.

And so it was that on the morning of Monday, 23 September 2002, I cycled to the railway station in Cambridge and got on the train to Dover, the journey proper starting in Calais. The rest is of course history, documented in the diary pages.

Along the way I kept a record of times, places and events which was published live on to a web page for my friends and family to read. The diary proved to be a great travelling companion, and enhanced by the knowledge that people were reading it.

Travelblog

If you're looking for the original travelblog, it's recreated in enhanced form with pictures in the diary section. The original unadulterated document, warts and all, is still available here.