This week’s dream: boats and bikes along the Rhine
A cycling holiday isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time, says Tim Moore in the Financial Times. Some people go on holiday to put their feet up, not to “rotate them several thousand times towards the ragged edge of endurance”. But a new, week-long luxury sail along the Rhine, from Basel to Amsterdam, offers a more civilised option: “daily disembarkations for a few gentle hours of in-saddle sightseeing up pan-flat bike paths”, followed by “the promise of allinclusive on-board indulgence”. Each day comes with a preprogrammed cycling route and “satnav tablets clamped to the handlebars”, so that everyone can go at their own pace.
From the banks of the river, the SS Antoinette looks like an overgrown tourism barge, but inside it’s much more appealing, with “bars fore and aft”, a gym and cinema, and staterooms “dominated by vast, plump beds” and full-width windows. The boat is “small enough” that you get to know your fellow travellers over dinner, yet “large enough to allow you to slope off on occasion without looking too rude”. At night, you can lie in bed and watch “the Black Forest slide by above moonspangled waters”.
The first day on the bikes is a “sunny downstream trundle” through a succession of “trim and quietly prosperous” German villages towards a “trestle table piled with snacks and refreshments”. An hour later, it’s lunch in a Renzo Piano-designed art gallery, served with more Riesling than is probably wise. It’s “nobody’s idea of a tough schedule”. And thus the “pattern is set”: heading off each morning for a “40km freewheel through poppygirdled vineyards and half-timbered towns”, with refreshment stops in ancient wine cellars or under parasols. There can be “nowhere more relaxing” to ride a bike. At times it’s like cycling “through a model village come to life”. Butterfield & Robinson (www.butterfield.com) has seven nights from £5,875pp based on two sharing.