15 across Europe
Rail, road or ride
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City to summit in twenty minutes
Tram, funicular and two cable cars take you from a café table to 2,256 metres of exposed ridge; take a jacket you would not think you needed.
Innsbruck, Austria · moderate
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Château to château by bicycle
900 km of signed, flat riverside route; two days of it between Blois and Tours is the best introduction.
Amboise & the Loire châteaux, France · moderate
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The Camargue from a horse
The local white horses are bred to work in water; a half-day gets you into marsh no vehicle reaches.
Arles, France · moderate
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Cycle the runways at Tempelhof
Two 2,000-metre runways, open to anyone, kept deliberately empty by referendum.
Berlin, Germany · low
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The interior, not the beach
Half the island is farmland at altitude — cheese, potatoes and Venetian towers, twenty minutes from the sand.
Naxos, Greece · low
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The island by bicycle
Hire at the pier, ride the length of it, and be back for the last ferry — the island's whole scale in one day.
The Aran Islands (Inis Mór), Ireland · low
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Round the walls on a bicycle
Four kilometres of Renaissance rampart, planted with plane trees in 1818 and used as a promenade ever since.
Lucca, Italy · low
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The city the way it is used
Rent for a day, ride out to Amsterdam-Noord on the free ferry, and stop thinking of the bicycle as an activity.
Amsterdam, Netherlands · low
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Ride the Rallarvegen down
The old navvies' road from Myrdal, gravel all the way, downhill nearly all the way — a bike, a train ticket and a whole afternoon.
Flåm, Norway · moderate
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Dog sledding on the glacier
Wheeled carts in summer, runners in winter, and the same dogs that supplied the mines before snowmobiles.
Longyearbyen, Norway · high
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The Šargan Eight
A 760 mm gauge line that loops over itself to climb 300 metres; two and a half hours and a great deal of leaning out of windows.
Mokra Gora, Serbia · low
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Across on the hanging gondola
The world's oldest transporter bridge, on the UNESCO list, still running every eight minutes as a local crossing.
Bilbao, Spain · low
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The wooden train to Sóller
1912 rolling stock through thirteen tunnels and an orange valley, then a tram to the port. Ordinary transport, and the best hour on the island.
Palma de Mallorca, Spain · moderate
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The Bernina line to Tirano
From glacier to palm trees in four hours, over the Landwasser viaduct and around the Brusio spiral — booked as a normal train, not a tour.
St. Moritz & the Engadin, Switzerland · moderate
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The slate railway to the coast
Built in 1836 to run loaded downhill by gravity; it still descends 700 feet to Porthmadog through the woods.
Eryri / Snowdonia (Betws-y-Coed), United Kingdom · moderate