Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book III), Part 93: Beer, circus, and the Great NABC vs. Big Red Liquors War of 2003.
THIS WEEK:
- The daily reckoning: The Complete 35 Days of Beercycling 2003 Journal (Germany, Austria) with photos, as written during the beercycling trip.
- This week’s topic sentence: “During the summer of 2003, I shipped my bicycle to Germany and ‘beercycled’ from Frankfurt to Vienna via several cycling routes, most prominently the Danube Cycle Path.”
- Glib conclusion: This 35-day beercycling journey is an undisputed highlight of my life as a card-carrying Europhile.
There’ll always be a warm spot in my heart for the summer of 2003, and an opportunity to live a beercycling dream.
But just as surely, the summer of 2026 will be remembered for a tidy convergence: these past few weeks, as it came time to document the 2003 trip, I was rediscovering the benefits of bicycling in real time.
As I’ve noted previously, bicycles came back into my life during the mid- to late-1990s for the first time since my early teens.
40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 76: A boy can dream – about beercycling (and a Requiem for Moose)
Then in 2000, Belgian rental bikes illuminated the dormant light bulb hovering above my head.
40 Years in Beer (Book III), Part 84: Y2K and the Belgian beercycling inaugural (1)
What ensued was the Roger’s Beercycling Era (2000 – 2010), both home and abroad, but particularly in Europe between 2003 and 2008.
- 2000 Belgium, France and the Netherlands (day trips with rental bikes)
- 2001 Belgium and Germany (day trips with rental bikes)
- 2003 Germany and Austria (touring with my own bike)
- 2004 Belgium and Netherlands (Tour de Trappiste; touring with my own bike)
- 2005 Netherlands and Belgium (Poperinge hops fest; touring with my own bike)
- 2006 Germany, Czech Republic and Austria (Prague – Vienna Greenway; touring with my own bike)
- 2008 Belgium and Netherlands (Poperinge hops fest; touring with my own bike)
- 2010 My year-long, 50th-birthday quest for 5,000 kilometers in Southern Indiana fell just shy following a leg injury
All these adventures included solo passages, but also...Read more
