Inspirations and previous trips

Olympia-Beijing 2008 will take me into a challenging climatic environment as well as into most interesting regions of cultural exchange.
Although being a North German lowlander who has been appreciating the benefits of bicycles for transportation (less for sports though) since very young age, I started to take an interest in long distance biking only in 2004, when I joined the Baltic Cycle Tour North Cape - Olympia for an eight day section in Finland.

On a summer tour from Tallinn to Germany in 2005 I found the slow means of bike travel most useful to follow part of the Red Army's war memorial-paved "Road to Berlin" 60 years after the end of WWII and even had a chance to discover my German family roots in the low-lying lands on the river Vistula (former Western Prussia).

With the experiences acquired on my first large "own tour", I soon enhanced my bike equipment and in the following year (2006) designed a route from Tallinn to the Mediterranean Sea that would take me across the lands of the 19th century Russian (Baltic countries and central Poland), Prussian (Kaliningrad/Königsberg) and Habsburg (Galicia, Slovakia, Austria, Slovenia, Trieste) empires added to by the physical challenge of crossing the European main water divide in the Beskid mountains and the Alps in Slovenia.

For my bike tours, I maintain two principles:
1. Start in an area, that you know and get a feeling of distance from that place both geographically as well as culturally. Even at your furthest point you will be able to positively relate back to where you started. In this sense, you can never get lost - or otherwise get the feeling of being lost.

2. When biking, minimize your sportive ambition as it will most likely reduce your perception of where you're moving. Whenever you can, slow down your speed, stop more often at places (rather than passing them by) and you will enhance your positive feeling of distance.