Sounds Idyllic yes? Well on the days like this it is but perhaps the greatest adventures are when things aren’t like this.

Our first trip was in 2010 and the idea was to ride from Ljubljana in Slovenia to Dubrovnik in Croatia. Simple we thought so we attached racks to our bikes ( myself on a road bike and Julie on a mountain bike) bought panniers off the interweb and started planning.

The first problem was how to fly the bikes. Plenty of bike boxes available but all of them seemed to be hard. As we were doing a linear route we needed something we could carry along with us. Finally we tracked down a company in New Zealand which did soft bags. This presented us with another problem though. Baggage handlers!!!!

Anybody that knows Julie knows she’ll talk to absolutely anyone about anything so I cleverly dispatched her to the local bike shops for tidbits of advice. She came back festooned with cardboard boxes, plastic thingamajigs for putting between the forks and a tiny looking hand pump. So I got some zip ties and a multi tool and we were set so we flew to Slovenia full of dreams of sunny days spent in Lycra.

Day one it rained. I’m Welsh so I’m used to rain but this was RAIN!!. The rivers of Ljubljana burst their banks and we ended up pushing the bikes through floods to leave the city. I’m a very experienced hill walker and a trained BELA leader but for some reason I didn’t seem to think the rules about keeping kit dry applied on a bike. My panniers weren’t waterproof and I hadn’t brought any dry bags!!

The next problem I encountered was almost falling off when my handlebars slipped. Now I’m a qualified mechanic but then I just slightly turned the hex bolt until I thought it was tight enough. It wasn’t.

After a quick retighten we finally got under way and started riding uphill and uphill and uphill. 40 miles of uphill. In the rain. This sounds horrible and I’m sure it was but what happened after we stopped going uphill was far worse. We started going downhill.

It was cold and because the bikes were unbalanced by the weight very very scary. We arrived at Postjona and had a tete de tete. Do we carry on? Do we bunker down here for the night? Or do we catch the train to Rkjeka and start again in the morning? We chose the latter so I threw some sopping wet denim shorts over my Lycra and got on the train.

But the story doesn’t end there. The train journey was about 2 hrs long and in this time my calf muscle cramped up into sheer agony. I made noises like Maria Sharapova when I tried to walk off the train. We were also in an industrial area of a strange foreign city with no idea where we would sleep and get dry.

We wandered about pushing our bikes for a bit until Julie shouted at me to man up and just get on my bloody bike so we rode and eventually found the city centre. I’m not sure but I may have been silently weeping at that point.

At the centre we were approached by an old fella who asked if we needed accommodation he took us to his flat in a building around the corner.

A bed settee has never ever been more comfortable. We found a restaurant around the corner had a couple of bottles of Croatian beer and ate our own bodyweights.

The bug had bitten us. We were hooked.

When I started writing this piece I had intended to write a summary of the whole trip but once I started writing the memories of that first day entranced me.

That’s not to say the rest of the trip was boring just to list some of the other events

Having to push bike due to Mura winds and the discovery of a mad canine the next day

A moonlit ride over Pag Island

The rescue of a Tortoise near Zadar

The broken hub that led to the discovery of Sibernik and riding pillion on a 500cc scooter in flip flops and shorts holding a wheel

The ferry trip in a storm

And the attempted mutiny I organized with some Estonians on a boat trip

So what I say is if you like adventure buy a pannier rack and some panniers and go. Just make sure they’re waterproof.