Traveler’s Journal

When: 7 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 23

Where: Sequim High School library, 601 N. Sequim Ave.

Cost: Suggested $5 donation (adults); 18 and younger, free

Presenters: Jeff and Louise Davis

Presentation: “Going with the flow: Exploring the rivers of Europe by tandem bike”

Louise jokes that I was born with a bike between my legs, but she’s only off by a few years.

I’ve never fallen out of love with biking since my first ride at age 5. Before I was 25, I had biked across the U.S. two-and-a-half times. Louise biked as a kid but didn’t really “get the bug” until her 40s. At the age of 49, shortly before we met, she too rode from coast to coast.

We met on a Cascade Bike Club ride and within a few months decided to try a tandem to make our riding a team event. We’ve never looked back. We decided to buy a tandem together long before we decided to marry.

By 2012 we’d been together 18 years (and gotten married) and ridden 60,000 miles on our tandem in the U.S. and Canada.

But that year a friend and her husband were on a fellowship, teaching and researching in Vienna. We were on a short list of friends invited to make use of a guest room there. We had been thinking of going to Europe for some time and this was the push we needed.

We spent a splendid week seeing the city with our friends, then biked from Vienna to Budapest. When floods in western Austria and southern Germany made our planned itinerary in that direction impossible, we changed plans, took a train to Holland and spent the next six weeks riding 900 miles crisscross through a country only one-fourth the size of Washington.

The cycling infrastructure astonished us. One statistic tells it all: In the tiny country of Holland, there are over 20,000 miles of signed cycling routes, a combination of trails and quiet country roads.

Two years later we returned, this time to ride in Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland, and found more of the same wherever we rode.

As “cyclists of a certain age,” we were less keen than we used to be about tackling hills and mountains and we discovered a vast network of bike routes along rivers that brought us not only flat riding but also a direct route to the most historical places in each country we visited. Castles and cathedrals are not built in remote towns; they’re built in cities along rivers that brought trade and wealth.

We returned to Europe in 2016 for our third and most extensive exploration, focusing this time on the Elbe and on parts of the Danube we did not get to explore in 2013.

In our Travelers Journal presentation, we will highlight those rivers plus the little-known Main River, the Moselle, the Meuse and a short but spectacular section of the Rhine. We hope you’ll be so impressed with the beauty and ease of cycling these routes that we bump into some of you when we return this coming summer to ride yet more rivers in Europe.

About the presenters

Jeff and Louise Davis both retired from positions at the University of Washington in 2007 and spent the first two years traveling, mostly by tandem bike, around the U.S., New Zealand, Australia and points in between.

They came to Sequim in 2012 and presented a show on a portion of that adventure, bicycling up the East Coast from Key West to Canada. Since then they have spent seven or eight months of every year in their condo in Ballard and four to five months exploring someplace new with their tandem bike.

“We seem to have an extreme case of exploritis, the need to travel to new places in the summer by bike and to histories and cultures all over the world through classes we audit at UW in the winter,” they write. “We hope you’ll enjoy our new presentation, highlighting several of the rivers we have explored in Europe in our three visits in 2013, 2015 and 2016.”

About the presentations

Traveler’s Journal is a presentation of the Peninsula Trails Coalition. All of the money raised is used to buy project supplies and food for volunteers working on Olympic Discovery Trail projects.

Shows start at 7 p.m. in the Sequim High School Library at 601 N. Sequim Ave.

Suggested donation is $5 for adults; those 18 years old and younger are free.

One selected photo enlargement will be given away each week as a door prize.

For more information, email Arvo Johnson at amjcgj@gmail.com.