As I promised our Way of Saint James did not end in Santiago, and continiously the blog gets updated to let you read how we made it through ten countries and closed the circle of the “Less-is-more-Tour”. For those readers who followed the Blog until now, they realized that there is not this mysterious black hole where all the pilgrims are walking into at the end of their pilgrimage and then disappear. We continue – as the project is even continuing in 2026 and further on. Climate change doesn’t stop – so we can’t stop either! We promised not to take an airplane back from Santiago as most of the…

Looking out of the window from our room of the Röderhuis an autumnal scenery mirrored in the harbour of Goedereede. A rich breakfast was awaiting us in the dining room with an open kitchen. The owner was an ancestor of the German artist Röder and the house felt like atelier and art gallery. The name of the town Goedereede means originally “good roadstead”, a safe anchorage that dates back to the Roman times, when they had already built a castell and vicus at this place. The name of the former island Goeree is also derived from the name of the town. It is now connected with the former island Voorne…

As you couldn’t get around these huge Newfoundlanders of Pim, we had to take at least a selfie together with them before leaving after breakfast. From Maldegem the border with the Netherlands is not really far, and it was very amusing that we were not only reaching the bikers paradise, but the first building directly at the border was even a bike shop. The only disappointing thing was they didn’t have a rear mirror as replacement for Robert’s broken one. During my speeches about climate change and the advantage of investing in a good bike infrastructure the Netherlands were once criticised as an unfair example, because it’s only flat and…

After spending the night in the hotel “Les Gens de Mer”, where we could park our bikes in one of the meeting rooms, we wanted to have a look at the Quai de la Cunette to see a bit of the harbour of Dunkerque, but it was no fun to bike against the wind that was so strong as it was even magnified by the high facades built along the Quai. At the beach of Dunkerque, called “Plage de Malo-les-Bains” which sounded to me like the French word for bathing trunks = maillot de bain, we found a tourist office. Being back on the continent and Robert not having the…

The morning started with a breakfast meeting with President Maxine Blades of the Rotary Club of Canterbury. Besides talking about our project another subject was definitely the news of Canterbury getting the first female Archbishop. We exchanged our pennants, and then it was time to get back on the road to catch the ferry in Dover. The wind was extremely strong while we loaded the bikes in the backyard. It was nearly blowing us out of town. Mostly a diagonal backwind was pushing us and maybe helped us to reach our goal quicker, but it was so violent that in forests under trees we were under the risk of being…

When we got our tickets for the Cathedral of Canterbury they told us that parts of the Cathedral were closed in the morning due to a special event, and would be reopened later. But behind the scenes the rumour spread quickly that this was a special day for Canterbury, because you could already see broadcasting vans from British TV outside while we entered the court in front of the cathedral. In the beginning of our visit we could only enter the Nave but had no access to the choir or the presbytery where the archiepiscopal throne stands, because a ceremony had just taken place there. So we had a look…

We had packed early after a nice breakfast at Langland B&B, and said goodbye to David and Gilles. As Robert had already organised the train tickets at Swansea Railway Station, we just had to bike there from Mumbles in time and wait for our Great Western Railways train. Thinking of the name “Great Western”, it did not include a “great” storage space for bikes. We were supposed to hang the bikes, but barely one fitted in the space and the second one had to stand next to it and was half in the aisle. Fortunately the conductor was cool with it as long as the tea trolley could move past,…

We had seen so many nice pictures of the Welsh coastline, that we wanted to get back on our bikes to discover more of the surroundings. As we had decided to spend one more night in Mumbles, but had to move from our original bed & breakfast to another one because it was unfortunately fully booked, we had a recommendation from Lisa to switch to the Langland Road B&B, which was run by David and Giles. So we charged our bikes again just to move over to another place within Mumbles, which was really nice and they were really helpful with our bikes (more to come later). Just after we…

It was an easy slow day for us to get to know a bit of Mumbles. We walked down to the Pier and had lunch there. Some more hiking over to the lighthouse and Bracelet Bay for the view and back to the Pier, where we ran into Kiki Babs, a drag queen having a photo session. It was a very funny situation because she pretended to be caught behind bars, where a sign said: “Danger Keep Out – no unauthorized access”, and right in that moment a policeman appeared and he took it with British humour. Same with the life guards, who let her play on their dinghy. We…

It was not quite evident how to get out of the octopus highway arms of car friendly urban planning to leave Pontypridd by bike, and we had to take a road twice to reach the Celtic Trail again. We were lead onto very steep roads uphill through the suburbs to get back on the National Cycle Network route number 4. Once we were up in the hills we shared our freedom again with the sheep and the birds. The trail followed an old railway track again, which must have served for the mining villages to reach the coast. It was going over rolling hills in autumn colours and green valleys…