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That's it. I'm home again. I'll follow up with a post summarizing the tour later. This post is only about the last two days of my tour for now. On day 85 I travelled from a camp site near Vechta to my parents place in Hamburg. Since I already now much of this area, there weren't many surpises. The weather reminded me of what living in Northern Germany is like ;) Crossing the Weser 100m before the ferry accross the Elbe river I met another velomobile going the opposite direction. On the ferry I talked to another velomobile pilot. So within 10 minutes I met two velomobile pilots after going for more than 9500km and 85 days without meeting any (apart from the factory in Romania). The rest of the day was spent getting a cup of tea, some food and catching up with my parents. On day 86 I decided to join the "Fridays for future" protests in Hamburg before cycling home. Many of the children there will be the ones primarily affected by the climate apocalypse. But they

 This morning I had a fantastic view from my tent during breakfast: Later I took the ferry to Deventer to take a closer look: Quite nice. Leaving Deventer I followed my "knoops"-route. But today this included some not so great paths and searching for the signposts really slows you down. So I used BRouter instead. You can porbably see the switch in the speed profile in ridewithgps. The speed increased again after I crossed the border. The surface of the german cycling paths/roads is much smoother, so you get faster with the same effort. Border. Not very impressive Again the first camp site I went to was closed. So I had to continue for another 40 km to the next one leading to a 214 km tour today.  Tomorrow I'll ride to Hamburg to get the keys to my flat from my parents place and on Friday I'll finish my tour in Lüneburg.

This night was really cold. Temperatures got down to 5°. This is the limit of the comfort zone of my sleeping bag. And it lives up to this. I wasn't fully comfortable but it was still ok. The first goal of the day was "'s Hertogenbosch". The city is probably quite ok to live in, but does not offer extraordinary sights. Remainder of the castle in "'s Hertogenbosch" After this I tried to stay away from cities and just continue cycling. By now I'd rather get home earlier and leave everything on the way to a later visit. It's not that far from home. Dutch version of combining a motorway with a bicycle path.  A problem I encountered is that BRouter favors larger roads. But the Netherlands have an interesting system of interconnected good cycling paths/roads where the crossroads are numbered and you are guided from one to the next by these numbers. I could not get BRouter to use the nicer paths. Installing the fietsknoop app should help. But at first I

Starting in Gent I followed the "F4 - Gent <-> Antwerp" cycling path this morning. Cycling in Gent was great even on a Monday morning and the cycling path was also great. Even the sign posts were informative and in the right places. I already thought I had found an example for a perfect cycling path as it should be. But a few kilometers before Antwerp (probably when I crossed from East Flandern to West Flandern) the signs suddenly looked different and were not always helpful/sometimes missing. This is really a problem with the cycling infrastructure. Much depends on the local districts. There are no standards and everybody does his/her own thing.  Antwerp welcomed me with an out of order elevator to the Sint-Annatunnel. I had to use a ferry instead. Many of the buildings where being renovated and because of a food festival on the weekend a lot of cleanup / deconstruction was still going on.   Not very welcoming. After a lunch I continued on to Tilburg crossing the borde

 Today I woke up to a nice sky at "Plopsa Land": After breakfast I started cycling towards Bruges. The cycling infrastructure in Belgium is much better than in France. You can cycle uninterrupted without constantly stopping to give way to everyone else. So I made some good progress. Most of the landscape was pretty flat and not very exciting. But todays focus was not on the landscape but on the cities. I arrived in Bruges after about three hours of cycling. Getting into the city was a bit of a hassle since today was the Time Trial of the UCI Road World Championships in cycling. A lot of roads were blocked and the finish was on a central place. Once I got through all of this I felt like I was in Lüneburg. Many streets are indistinguishable from streets in Lüneburg. Still the inner city is a lot bigger and contains more distinguished buildings. Entering through one of the city gates After having seen much of the city and having some lunch I continued to Gent. Which is in my opi

This morning I cycled to Boulogne first. I had once taken a ferry from there to the UK and remembered that some parts were quite nice. Well I was wrong. Or at least I did not find the nice parts. The same goes for Calais. At least there is a lighthouse: Both cities are industrial. And there is nothing much to see (or I did not find it). At least up until Calais the surroundings where quite nice. You could see the english coast quite well from the top of the hills. And there were quite a few of them. When trying to climb the very last hill, my first first gear gave up and I had to push the bike all the way up. Not a fun activity. But this is the last steep climb I had to do until I get home (I hope at least). Most of the remaining journey is through completely flat territory.  The flat territory has different challenges. Starting with Gravelines up until Dunkirk progress was very slow cycling through the cities. Signposts were sometimes there, but most of the time missing. And many of t