Category: Travel

  • Midnight Sun Odyssey: Day 1

    My phone vibrated in the distance, quickly followed by the ear-piercing screech of its alarm. It’s 4am and far too early for this, I can’t ignore the noise but somehow manage to pick out a rhythm and follow it in my head, this works… I even manage to loosely stick words from a Bob Dylan…

  • Madrid Marathon

    I didn’t have the best start to my day. Our flight from Dublin to Madrid was very early and we needed to be at the airport by 5am… I was still working a 2am and hadn’t packed. After 2 hours sleep I was on the road to pick up Joe and with two heavy sighs…

  • Long Way To Luxembourg… Day 15

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  • Long Way To Luxembourg… Day 14

    Packing my motorcycle after a couple of days in the same place is always interesting, somehow my gear never seems to fit gracefully back into the panniers – it always requires prodding, poking, stuffing, punching, pushing to finally squeeze those lids closed. Needless to say nothing I carry is remotely fragile, except me of course.…

  • Long Way To Luxembourg… Day 13

    I woke in my small hotel room in Ouistreham. It had a maritime theme; shells and mermaids painted on the wall, a porthole for a window and I’m sure the room was swaying from side to side. I felt ill, I wasn’t sure if it was seasickness brought on by this claustrophobic steerage cabin or…

  • Long Way To Luxembourg… Day 12

    It was time to leave Luxembourg. Packing after staying in the same place is never easy when you need to pack all our gear into a couple of panniers, you always seem to have more stuff. I got it all in eventually and packed the bike for the journey. We said our goodbyes and headed…

  • Long Way To Luxembourg… Day 11

    The day after a marathon is always a challenge especially in the walking normally department and this particular day after was additionally challenging since the race finished earlier that morning. The first order of the day was breakfast, and a slap up fried brekkie with all the trimming was, for once, well deserved. My family…

  • Long Way To Luxembourg… Day 9

    After a good nights sleep I was up and out early. I wanted to briefly visit the Mercedes-Benz museum before leaving Stuttgart so after I checked out and  packed my motorcycle I made the short trip across town towards the museum. I found a nice café nearby for breakfast before going in. Once inside I…

  • Long Way To Luxembourg… Day 8

    Riding through the Bohemian countryside from Prague to Pilsen was a joy. I was on my way to Pilsen to visit the first brewery in the world to brew Pilsner before entering Germany. Staying off the main highways I found myself stopping often in towns and villages that seemed to ooze an honest cultural warmth…

  • Long Way To Luxembourg… Day 7

    Prague was a surprise. Its endless narrow winding cobbled streets, large bright squares and stunning architecture had me walking for hours and loving every step. A day was never going to be enough and I found myself being pulled onto the next sight as time was ticking. One thing that I noticed about Prague was…

  • Long Way To Luxembourg… Day 6

    Last day in Krakow and after packing the bike and paying off the sour faced car park attendants I headed for Oskar Schindler’s ceramics factory. To get there I had to cross railway tracks and I could help but wonder what these tracks carried during the second world war. The factory was close to the tracks…

  • Long Way To Luxembourg… Day 5

    Today I could relax, and the only distance I had to cover was as far as I wanted to explore on foot in Kraków. This city is beautiful, it is crammed with the most beautiful architecture I have even seen, it is clean and seems to have everything I could want. The Main Market Square…

  • Long Way To Luxembourg… Day 4

    After two days off my motorcycle I was looking forward to getting back on the road. It was going to be a long day; I had to ride over 600km to reach Kraków in Poland. Leaving Berlin I was filled with equal measures of excitement and apprehension as I started the next leg of my…

  • Long Way To Luxembourg… Day 3

    I woke later than planned, the ride from the Dutch coast really took it out of me and I welcomed the lie in.  I was so excited! I’m in Berlin!! Well, several miles south of Berlin but it’s Berlin all the same. I showered, dressed and packed my gear away before heading out to catch…

  • Long Way To Luxembourg… Day 2

    I slept really well and was woken by an announcement in Dutch over the ships loud speakers… luckily the message was repeated in English and it turns out I have a little over an hour before we docked in Holland. My cabin was right a the front of the ship facing forward so when I…

  • Long Way To Luxembourg… Day 1

    To many the purpose of the trip is to run the Luxembourg marathon but really it’s all about the journey… it’ll take two weeks and almost 5,000 kilometers to get there and back and I’m looking forward to every minute and meter on the road. It didn’t start according to plan, I forgot that I…

  • 2010 Great North Run, Newcastle

    The crew strapped my motorcycle securely to deck and I climbed the stairs to my “club-class” seat, which turned out to be a seat like any other except it was in an exclusive part of the ship separated from the rest by a chrome gate, which turned out to be a part of the ship like any…

  • 2010 Dublin City Half Marathon

    OK, I had a problem. There are two races that I love to run; the Dublin City half marathon in Ireland and the Great North Run in Newcastle, England. Both 13.1 miles long but quite a distance from one to the other. A quick glance at a map will highlight the additional obstacle of the…

  • Achill Half Marathon

    The Achill Half is one of my favourite races and this year I decided to take my motorcycle along for the ride. As children my siblings and I spent our long summer holidays in a remote coastal village called Claggan, I use the term village in the broadest sense of the word – there were no…

  • Docklands Fun Run

    One of the pleasures of riding a motorcycle is that you can park pretty much wherever you want… and I really couldn’t get much closer to the start line of this year’s Docklands 8K than this: The weather was perfect and the turnout was again bigger than last year but there is still a building site…