Starting on the 4th September from outside Paris’s famous Notre Dame Cathedral on the Ile de la Cite, our route initially follows the River Seine southwards out of the city, going as far as Troyes by the end of the second day (or so we hope). From here, we will head east towards the Vosges, passing through Joinville on the Marne and Neufchateau on the Meuse before crossing the Moselle near Epinal. Here we will start to climb in to the picturesque Vosges, the first serious mountains of our journey. Crossing in to Germany over the Rhine between Colmar and Freiburg we then rapidly meet our second set of mountains; those of the Black Forest.
The next major landmark is not a set of mountains, it is the Bodensee (Lake Constance), which we hope to view from the southern, Swiss, bank. A brief sidestep will take us through Liechtenstein and on in to Austria and our first taste of the Alps. A few passes later and we will be in Imst facing a 60 km climb to our high point of 2474 m at the Timmelsjoch Pass. We chose this crossing point in to Italy after rejecting the adjacent and better known Brenner Pass for being too low ... possibly in a moment of madness.
Another sidestep will take us to Cortina in the heart of the Dolomites (JR, being a Geologist, could not pass up this opportunity) before the final downhill run to Venice on the 17th September.
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