the plan

Hi, and welcome to the blog of Wally and Nadia, with maybe a few other friends dropping in along the way. We're going on a bike ride.


We have been out of Oz now for half a year, living and working in the small town of Braemar, in the highlands of Scotland. Nadia was working in the Fife Arms hotel for a while, before running the shop at Glenshee Ski Centre. I was working at the Braemar Mountain Shop, working as a ‘ski tech’, which involved winging my way through the winter pretending to know something about snow, and drilling many a hole into very expensive skis.

The basic idea now is to hop on our bicycles and ride. The first destination is east, to the shore of Loch Ness. After rounding the southern end of the loch the bikes will be turned north towards the Orkney and Shetland islands. From there we are looking at Bergen in Norway, but that depends on hitching a ride, if there is a ride to be hitched. Otherwise it will be onto the Aberdeen ferry for us, then cycling to Newcastle before ferrying again over to Denmark. Either way, we will be cycling through Denmark, into Germany and from there… who knows. I guess it depends on the weather, the wind, the landscape, the promise of good food. The options are simple – left, or right. Left will have us exploring the less touristy Eastern Europe, where right would put us into a French summer and Spanish Autumn.

And that’s about as concrete our short term plans are so far. Looking further ahead means preparing for a second European winter. When and where the weather turns nasty will determine when and where we hole up for a few months and hopefully give a bit back to the bank accounts that we’ll be ravaging along the way. When the sun warms the road ahead, we will be on the bikes again and cruising through unseen parts of Southern Europe before journeying into the deep, dark unknown of Africa - top to bottom, with a bit of a wiggle through the middle.

Then after all this exhausting travelling that would have most people upgrading to business class, no no, not for us official ‘Widget the World Watcher’ world watchers. We, being the eco warriors we are, will then be hoping to catch a ride on a yacht, cunningly disguised as competent crew members. As to the where that the yacht will be dropping us, that will probably be discussed at length over a bottle of rum.