St Peter’s Square. Uploaded to Flickr by lafiguradelpadre, used under license Attribution 2.0 Generic
I’ve lost track of when I first heard of the Via Francigena. I think it was from a Reddit post a few years ago, on some kind of cycle touring community, where someone wrote up their account of doing a ‘mini Francigena’, riding from Milan to Rome. This when I first learned about the existence of this >1,000 year old pilgrimage route from Canterbury to the Eternal City, which really captured my imagination. I’ve felt like this would be the dream adventure and I’ve related how much I want to do it to a many people, but after some agonising, I’ve decided to put it on indefinite hold. This is a short write-up of why I wanted to do the Via Francigena, why I’ve decided not to, why that’s worth writing about, and what I’m thinking about doing instead.
The Via Francigena really is a very long way to go
I’ve done my share of multi-day rides, including outside of the UK, but nothing that approaches the length of the Via. The longest tour I’ve done hauling the gear and camping (at least for some of it), the Caledonia Way, was 380 km. I’ve also done a 400 km and 600 km ride but on a more heads-down-bums-up basis without carrying so much. By comparison, the Via is about 2,000 km. This would amount to approximately 5 Caledonia Ways in a row, and you can throw in some chunky over-the-mountains crank-ups for fun. I really do feel the call of the Eternal City, especially given the historical significance of the route, being as it was Archbishop Sigeric’s route from c. 900 CE from Canterbury to Rome. But it is a long-distance pilgrimage which takes a long time, longer than I’ve ever spent away from work, let alone cycling.
Trying to plan the Via as a calendar activity is just too much for me
Among there being so many complications about the Via, there is the matter of getting home after the arrival in the Eternal City. It would actually be great to ride this trip the other way around, i.e. do the bulk of the travelling up-front, and cycle my way towards home after. But with the Via, if you want to be a real pilgrim, getting your passport stamped and sleeping in the churchyards and what have you, this isn’t how it is. You’re meant to be working towards the big ticket arrival in St Peter’s Basilica. But when you have a trip that is so long, I want to start factoring in extra time risk allowance in case of delays on the route there. What if the weather is really abysmal for 2 or 3 days at a time? What if I find myself really tired and need longer to rest than I’d accounted for? What if I’m just not as fast as I thought I was? What if, what if. Factor that in these what ifs over 2,000 kilometres, and I’m not so confident estimating my date of arrival, and consequently, my return home plan (and specifically, my return to work). Especially since I’d really like to avoid flying for environmental reasons, I’d much sooner return by train or maybe Blablacar or Flixbus (or a mix of all the above). Getting bike reservations and tickets for all these things isn’t at all easy.
I’ve done some hard thinking about this and I’ve decided that I just can’t afford to do it. But that this is OK and doesn’t make me a lesser person; it is just simply too long a trip for me right now. Maybe it is just me but in the past few years I’ve been used to watching people do things like the Transcontinental Race, and viewing other people’s accounts of these amazing journeys and feel like I’m letting life go by and mising out. The multi-slide instagram uploads with the cool pictures don’t help, and I’ve had to catch myself thinking I’m ‘just making excuses.’ But I think, with my reasoning cap on, this is just baloney. Blowing so much paid time off on one endeavour is just something I can’t do at this time.
It feels to me like the expectation is you should aspire to spend weeks on end on tours
I don’t know to what extent this is a ‘just me’ kind of thing, but it seems to me there is a lot more expectation out there that one should aim for long multi-day adventures across entire countries or further as a given. I don’t hold anyone to blame for this happening – maybe it hasn’t happened and it’s just my imagination – but I think the preponderance of hundreds of kilometres-long races such as the Transcontinental Race and has normalised the idea of going out and doing every year what at one point was a perhaps once-in-a-lifetime kind of achievement. After all, the world’s largest (by participation) long-distance bike ride, Paris-Brest-Paris, is only every four years. I actually feel insecure thinking of offering paid emergency repairs and cycling preparation tuition as I do, because ‘I haven’t done an ultra yet,’ as if I am obliged to endure some kind of torment before I can train someone on how to fix a snapped chain or how to guard against hypothermia.
Anyway this is starting to become a ramble, so to briefly summarise, I’ve come to realise is that there isn’t actually anyone brandishing a ‘are you good enough’ measuring tape at me when I’m deciding what bikes to go and do. Tours that are ‘only’ 400 or 500 kilometres long at this point are what I can max out doing and that is OK.
Alternative ‘maybe’ plans to riding the Via
Riding from Hook of Holland to Berlin
This was actually a draft plan for summer 2025. A really dear friend had just moved to Berlin, and I’d already cycled from the Hook of Holland to Bonn (many years ago). I also liked the idea of riding to another major capital city, exploring it upon arrival and of course seeing my pal. And compared to the Via, return transport with trains back across toward home would be quite straightforward. It did occur to me that it could be handy to ride from Berlin toward home, but that also means pedalling against the east-to-west prevailing winds that are predominant across Europe, and doesn’t quite have that same achievement of getting from one’s home to one’s friend’s. There were a few different route options. There is a classic ‘Eurovelo’ route which does a bunch of capital cities, from Dublin to Berlin, but it is quite circuitous and unrushed so to use that to get to Berlin would be about 1,000 kilometres. I found a few options online, including a more direct 760 km one, but that is a bit more rough and ready, and not nearly so well-travelled.
The reason I flaked on it was firstly that my friend found their emigration there very stressful, specifically owing to lots of visa nightmares. And lastly, it turns out that Berlin, while not as distant as Rome, is quite far away. I always imagined Berlin as the middle of Germany, slap between the historical West and East countries. It really isn’t – it’s about six-sevenths of the way across to Poland. Even allowing for a daily distance of about 90-100 km and some days off to walk around and recover/do laundry, I’d be looking at about 8-9 days. I’m not yet in a position to undertake time away that’s so lengthy. What would be more doable would be to get to Hook of Holland and then skip across the country on the train to maybe Gronau. This is about 3 hours by train and would leave an outstanding 500 km to do on the bike to Berlin. I’m putting a pin in this idea as a maybe.
Riding around Normandy/Brittany
More close to home, and more feasible on shortness grounds, would be to get a ferry across to France, and to ride around the northern coastal areas. This is the home territory of the Normans, who invaded and subjugated England in 1066. It has some amazing landmarks I do want to ride my bike past, such as the famous Mont-Saint-Michel castle in the sea, and general history buff galore so it definitely ticks my boxes on the ‘things to look at off the bike’ row.
The Normandy tourism board has a great website with a bunch of tour itineraries set out to cater for different distance and climbing appetites. This really helps out because unlike the route to Berlin, I’d have to do much less route planning. I’d still be ‘bikepacking’ to save money and have more flexibility in my day-to-day planning, but the ‘how do I get home?’ question is easier, as rail links to the various ports on France’s northern coast to get the ferry home are pretty widespread.
What does wind me up, though, is the cost of Britanny Ferries services back across the channel. Single journeys of one person with a bicycle in June 2026 from Cherbourg to Portsmouth are (at the November 2025 time of checking), £62.50. If I were to book ‘on the day’ I think they’d be more like £87.50. This is from a booking very far in advance, and you’d also need to factor in the train cost of getting to Portsmouth. The costs of these ferries, when I don’t want a cabin or anything, just on a seat on a boat that’s going that way anyway, is high seas robbery. Even more shockingly, it is more expensive for two passengers to cross with two bicycles on the car deck than one car (£159 vs £175). This is obscene, and you can see this laughing stock for yourself on the Britanny Ferries website. Bearing in mind these are single journeys, I’d end up eating this cost twice, coming to around £150 just to get the boat there and back. While I appreciate the company has to stay afloat somehow, I really find this massive cost is sticking in my throat to the point where it puts me off.
While I moan about the ferry cost, the sights of Normandy do look incredible. I am especially wanting to see Mont-Saint-Michel (pictured above) in person and I’ve historically found that cycling in France gets you treated very charmingly and patiently by everyone you encounter, even if my clumsily-spoken French is true acid for the eardrums.
I’m putting a pin in this one too. While more expensive to cross than I’d like, it is more get-to-and-back-able and it fits the bill for a ‘multi-day getaway with a bike’ that doesn’t require flying. And fundamentally, no-one gets to their deathbed and regrets buying ferry and train tickets.
Staying in the UK
I’ve done a few trips without going abroad, and I feel like there is a heap left to do here, which could definitely scratch the adventuring itch. If I were needed to stay in the UK there are a few options I’m thinking about for bike trips. One would be the ‘Badger Divide’ from Inverness to Glasgow, which is a chunky mountain biking route, but with both the start and end of the trip very accessible from my home with my bike using rail. This is an important factor for me, because many itineraries such as Trans Eryri would mean I’d be in the difficult position of struggling to get back home using complicated and lengthy rail changes afterwards. One easier by train option is the famous South Downs Way, but that definitely has the reputation as a bit of a lumpy mountain biking brawler, and I’m not sure that’s what I want at this time. I’m hoping to use my drop-bar bike on smooth-ish surfaces without needing to wrangle my bike up steep uphills, or hammering the brakes on tricky descents. And frankly, it would be great to not be really sweaty and mucky at the end of each day, though I’m familiar with how a pack of wet wipes before bedtime can be a big help.
Further, the real draw of the Via was the romance of sleeping in churchyards and the historicity of it, aside from the cycling. It just seems like a bit of a shame to pass on something with such strong cultural and historical significance. So, my requirements are: historically interesting stops, not too hilly, not too long and expensive, and easy to get to and back.
An idea has struck me… Back to Belgium!
While writing this blog up, I reflcted a bit on an audax I did in Belgium a few years ago, and how easy it was to get to and back. Mooting this, I searched for cycle tour plans in the Flanders region, and I think I’ve hit on to something. What’s turned up is the ‘Art Cities Route,’ which is in Belgium. Publicised on the Cycling in Flanders website, it’s 320 km long and seems quite train-able. My draft plan is get the ferry to Dunkirk (cheap! About £25 for a one way crossing with a bicycle), ride from there to De Panne in Belgium, get a 2 hour train to Brussels, and then start the route from here, finishing the route at the coast, or maybe getting a train from Bruges depending on how I feel. That’s part of the joy of cycling that the Via seems a bit more restrictive about. I like that I can be flexible with making plans of this kind, and I don’t need to keep to some kind of schedule.
I think this is a good medium-term route to have a pin in. A big plus this has over things like more rural routes like my plan for northern France is that I can use hostels in Mechelen, Antwerp and Ghent etc to wash and lock up my bike to look around cities properly. I am very experienced with using cheap hostels as laundries, where you step in to the shower wearing your cycling gear and use this as a place to scrub everything up using a bar of soap from the shop.
Wrapping up and next steps
This blog took some time to write, but in so doing, I’ve done a small mental journey. I’ve yearned to do the Via Francigena for a while, but writing up this blog has helped me come to terms with how this just is not something I can commit to at this point in my life. But while doing research for my alternative plans, I’ve scoped out some great adventures. I’ve put a pin in one ‘maybe’ ride to Berlin, another ‘maybe’ for northern France, but a strong ‘yes this seems like a great idea’ for Belgium. I hope something about this blog has been helpful for you, and wish you luck with planning your own trips. I’ll be sure to update this blog about how my next multi-day trip goes.
Calum On Wheels 
