Our last blog told the story of Operation Chastise and the Dam Busters which took place in May 1943. The leader of the 617 Squadron RAF that carried out the raids on the Mohne, Eder and Sorpe Dams was Wing Commander Guy Gibson. This visit to Steenbergen in the Netherlands would complete for Greg a story that started as a curious boy. Firstly reading about the bouncing bomb and then the Dam Busters raid, watching the movie, visiting the Derwent Dam where the rai...

Technology these days allows us to do things that people in 1943 would have thought science fiction. We can watch live sport on TV from anywhere in the world, We can see young boys being saved from a certain death in flooded Thai caves - live on Facebook. We can send and receive money from banks all over the world without entering a real building. In 1943 a new invention was instrumental in destroying German hydro-electric dams that had been identified as import...

Our ride today was only about 200km but we had some very important business to do before we reached our accommodation - we needed to purchase tickets to the MotoGP at the Sachsenring! We are staying in a town called Neukirchen, about 30km from the track in a lovely hotel called Zum Anger. Buying the MotoGP tickets turned out to be a bit of an adventure. About 100km into our ride it started to rain and was still drizzling when we got to the track. We found the t...

Leaving our Krakow hotel at 9am this morning we had about 495km to ride. As this was a long ride by our standards, it was decided to use the freeways to get us to Prague, as we didn't want to arrive late. Routes were entered on the GPS and we set off. We were a bit confused when Chris turned right out of the hotel carpark as our GPS said to go left - but the rule is you follow the rider in the lead, so we followed. After about 30 minutes of country roads and no s...

We woke this morning to the sad news that IOM TT racer William Dunlop had died during practice for the Skerries Road Race in Ireland. William was the son of Robert Dunlop and nephew of Joey Dunlop both who also died while road racing. R.I.P William. We thought our ride today would be about 385 km but Greg did a bit more research and we only ended up having to ride 285 km. We spent most of the ride on country roads passing fruit orchards, pine forests and farmlan...