6,500km Cycle Ride

The Route of the journey very approximately, Day to day accounts will show the exact route taken

Northern France to Belgrade and Back
Summer 1984
This is my diary account of a 6,500 kilometre cycle journey from the North Coast of France to Belgrade and back. Originally, we intended to only cycle to Greece and then fly back, but when we were nearly there, in the middle of Yugoslavia as it was then known, we started to find the deprivations of this part of Europe too difficult – we couldn’t get enough to eat, it was extremely hot and dry, and we got food poisoning. So instead we turned around and cycled back a different way through the green wet mountains and home. I kept a daily diary and drew the line of our journey onto the maps. Also a cycle computer was used to measure daily distance and total distance
The account is quite long as the journey lasted for 4 months, and I will post it sporadically when I have nothing exciting to post from the day in hand, but will collect the posts together so that they can be read in order on a separate page. Occasionally, I have added comments to the diary in places and these have been put into square brackets

Photographs and slides were taken on a dodgy old camera, so quality is not of the best, and there are images that I pasted into my diary at the time, taken from leaflets and information I collected as I went about the areas travelled through
Day    1 Sailing to Roscoff, Camp at Santec
Day    2 Santec to Carhaix, Finistere
Day    3 Carhaix to Carnac, Morbihan
Day    4 and 5 Carnac, Morbihan
Day    6 Foret du Gavre, Loire Atlantique
Day    7 and 8 St Florent, Loire
Day    9 St Florent to Loudun, Vienne
Day 10,11 Loudun, Chauvigny
Day 12 Chauvigny to St. Junien
Day 13 St. Junien to Aix en Vienne
Day 14 Aix en Vienne to St. Yrieix
Day 15 St. Yrieix la Perche
Day 16 St. Yrieix to Cadouin