A couple of hours after dawn a Porsche broke the monotony of the most boring stretch of road I have ever driven. The driver must have seen the sign ahead that said welcome to Germany, and he left Belgium behind and passed us at a speed of about 150mph as the long, boring road turned into an autobahn. Apart from losing a wheel trim somewhere near Cologne, our long journey from Manchester was fairly uneventful.

During 18 months of travelling through Asia and South America, I had started to appreciate just how much is on our doorstep back in Europe, and just how little I had seen of it. So here I am with Helen at the beginning of a three-week road trip with a bag full of travel books and two bikes fastened to the roof. A year back on the treadmill of normal working life has put paid to any longer trips for the time being.

The first stop is a German spa town that was once popular with the Kaisers. Helen has brought me here to show me where she lived and worked for a few months back in her student days; and I've previously only been to Germany for business trips and long-haul flight changes, so I'm glad to be experiencing it properly this time.

Sitting on a tributary of the Rhine, Bad Ems is a good place to start, and a great base for some cycling trips along the two rivers. Using the train in one direction, and the ferries to get back and forth across the water, we have now cycled all the way between the Lorelei statue on the River Rhine and the town of Nassau on the River Lahn, where we found a medieval festival with full battle re-enactments, and visited some old friends of Helen's. Along the way we found towns and villages that looked like they had barely changed since the Middle Ages; and here we filled up on hearty food and sampled beer and wine from the weinstuben.

My German is non-existent compared to Helen's, but it isn't too difficult to work out that the Bad in Bad Ems means bath or spa, so we booked an afternoon session in the large spa complex to see what life was like as a German Kaiser. Pretty good, I reckon!

Posted on 15th January 2015.