Thanks to the recent gas crises — due to the strikes at oil refineries 30-40% of the gas stations have shortage of at least one type of gasoline — Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes announced last week that all regional trains and buses were free this past weekend. We though about taking our bikes […]
We briefly visited the French capital this past weekend to leave our passport applications at the consulate. The Paris consulate is the only place to for the Finnish expats to apply for a passport in France, and it’s been made extremely expensive compared to applying for the passport in Finland; […]
In August we toured Loire river valley on bicycles for almost three weeks (including driving there and back), altogether 800 kilometers in 14 days of riding. Because of a glitch on my Google Drive account I have not been able to download all the photos from the drive, so I […]
This certainly has been a bizarre Spring. When we were in South Tyrol in Italy attending the biathlon world championship in February, we already started to hear and read about the alarming rate of new coronavirus cases in Lombardia region in Northern Italy. We were not really worried, even if […]
After returning from the Biathlon World Cup in Antholz-Anterselva last Spring, we bought tickets to this year’s World Championships, and began a long wait to revisit this lovely area in South Tyrol (Alto Adige) in Northern Italy. This time it was quite different, though: there were far more races and […]
Old railway lines make perfect bike paths: they go from town center to town center, or from village to village, and even if not completely flat, they have gentle grades. The US has its Rails-To-Trails project, which is a nation-wide system, and France has La Dolce Via in the Ardèche […]
We had another brilliant idea of riding one of the remaining sections of ViaRhôna that we have not visited before. We took an early morning train to Annecy and then spent over 20 kilometers to get out of the town and its vicinity. There were supposed to be two bike […]
Saariselkä is more than thousand kilometers North of Helsinki and it took us 12 hours to get there; first by train to Oulu (5h30m), where we changed to another train for Rovaniemi (2h15m). From there we took a bus to Saariselkä (3h). We arrived late in Lapland but it was […]
The reason for this trip was that Tomi’s mother, and my mother-in-law, turned 80 this July. However, we missed the actual birthday, since we were attending the FIFA Women’s World Cup third place match on that day. Everything started when we bought the last minute tickets to that match. Then […]