Route coming soon!
Hopefully by Tuesday coming I will have a fairly well-planned route on the site for you to peruse. Updates to the existing information include the fact that I’ll likely be starting in Monaco which adds another country/principality/whatever to the list and that I’ll be diverting slightly from the most direct route to take in some nice places.
These include Gelsenkirchen in Germany, which is a twin city of Newcastle. I was considering aiming for as many twin cities as I could, but Bergen and Groningen are simply too far out of the way. However, I’m hoping to go to Haifa as part of my visit to Israel on the way back to Europe. I just found out that it, too, is a twin city of Newcastle!
As things stand, I have an approximate total of 952 miles so far, so I need to add a couple of detours. A shame I don’t think I can cross any more countries without adding far more than that. For the record, I’ve been using the RAC Route Planner to calculate distances as well as the AA road atlas from Dymocks. There’s been one point where the route I’d pencilled and the one on the RAC site didn’t agree, but combining the two has been very useful.
Tomorrow, I’m intending to spend some time buried in Lonely Planet guides in a bookshop in Brisbane working out what I can do in lots of these towns I’ve never heard of!