Pelotome –
around Belgium on a bicycle.
“Next day we left gay Paris, with its millions of tri-coloured flags fluttering in all directions, and started for Belgium.
The landscape was delightfully fresh and green, with forest lands and cultivated paddocks.
The peasants utilize their holdings to the utmost ; many plots not over 10 acres would have half-a-dozen kinds of crops – a little patch of wheat, another of barley, then various vegetables and poppies, the latter grown for opium.”
~ Round About The World on Bicycles – G.W. Burston & H.R. Stokes (1890).
My Life and Times
by Jerome K. Jerome
From £4,75
1874
Bicycling; Its Rise and Development.
“A text book for riders” aimed to cater for the rapidly developing bicycle movement by filling the void, after early books about the wooden wheeled machine had become valueless. With numerous illustrations to assist the beginner, the book is packed with informative chapters on routes in England, Ireland, Scotland, Switzerland, The Battlefields of 1870, Upper Rhine, Belgium, Germany, Holland, and France – each highlighting the points of interest, hotels, museums, mileage, gradients and road conditions along the way,
The five routes in Belgium take in Antwerp – Brussels; Ostend – Brussels; Brussels – Liege; Liege – Spa; and Liege – Cologne; while the route covering the “Battlefields of 1870” is recommended to link Belgium to Switzerland.
- Published by Tinsley Bros., London.
Summer 1888 – Published May 1924.
Trips to Hell.
“And other countries” was George Thayer’s 564 page insightful follow-up to his 1886 “Pedal and Path” ride across America. Aged 71 at the time of publication in 1924 – some four years before his death – it followed his many trips around every corner of the globe, mainly taken between 1912 and 1922 on foot, train and boat, however it also includes brief accounts of his bicycle rides in 1888 and 1897 through Britain, Europe and Canada.
Briefly mentioning his ride “bicycling from Paris, down towards Lyons”, “at the Chateau de Fontenay, the guest of the Countess Montsaulnin” and “along the Mediterranean coast of France, near Nice, in 1888,” he also reminisces of his time in 1919, where he served “in welfare work nearly a year, practically all the time in France,” and a visit to Paris with a “walk along the sea from the vicinity of Genoa to Nice”, in 1923 .
- By George B. Thayer.
- Published by Case, Lockwood & Brainard, Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.A.
July 1889 – Published 1890.
Round About The World on Bicycles.
“The pleasure tour of G.W. Burston and H.R. Stokes, Melbourne Bicycle Club, Australia,” follows George Burston and Harry Stokes on their 56-inch high-wheel bicycle journey around the world, setting off from Melbourne, on 1st November 1888, arriving back in Australia on the 14th December 1889,
As also chronicled in The Australasian, on 22nd March 1890, they actually left their bicycles in London to visit Brussels – “a fine city, full of grand old and new buildings.” – catching a train from Paris in July, 1889, and also visiting Waterloo and the Royal Lace Works, before continuing on to Berlin.
- “by G.W. Burston and H.R. Stokes.
- Published by George Robertson and Company, Melbourne, Australia “for private circulation only”
SUNDAY SHELTER AT COBBLER’S.
“Crossing a bridge to the right over the Vesdre, before I could reach the suburbs again the rain came down so heavily I was driven for shelter to a wood shed in the rear of a cobbler’s house.
There I dismounted from the bicycle and, spreading the dripping gossamer coat out on the wood pile, was about to sit down on the wood myself when the cobbler came out of the house and motioned me to come in.
I was cold and I was wet and he took me in.
I still feel that cobbler and his good wife were my neighbors then and are now, if they are yet alive.
After all that took place in and around their home in August, 1914, how I wish I knew.”
~ George B. Thayer ~ “Trips To Hell“, 1924.