Tandeming friends of ours had attended TT2017 and thoroughly enjoyed it, writing an article for theTandem Club Journal we produce. It caught our interest and we put our names down for the 2018 meet. It’s usually by invite, so we were pleased to be accepted. The meet took place in Bensheim, where the organisers had pre-booked a large number of rooms in a suitable hotel.

We caught an early morning ferry from Dover, stopping overnight near Liège, Belgium then arrived at Bensheim the next afternoon. We were welcomed on the terrace of the hotel, meeting up with friends old and new. In the evening we had a formal welcome and talk at which the plans and rides for the weekend were covered.

Breakfast and evening meals were taken together in the large restaurant area – it was a multi-lingual affair with the majority of guests being from Germany and a smattering from the UK, the Netherlands and France. In the evenings after dinner, we enjoyed short presentations on various topics, which included a very impromptu slide show from me about our Land’s End to John O’ Groats ride in the summer of 2012.

The rides were a mix of road, cycle path – and there’s a lot of excellent cycle infrastructure in Germany – and some mild ‘off-road’ forest tracks. The weather was mixed, as is often the case in late May/early June, so we had one damp day, but it really didn’t spoil things.

Ride destinations included Darmstadt, Worms and Heidelberg.