I am Jan Koelstra, a semi-retired computer technician. I have cycled all of my life: When at highschool I used my bicycle to get to the school 28km from home. Only with severe winter weather I took the bus. In this time I made my first holiday on bicycle. It was 1982, a trip with my father in the direction of Denmark. Unfortunately he got homesick, so we turned back home before reaching the danish border. I got the tatsed and liked it so next year I went on my own again. and now got really infected with the cycling traveller virus. The result was that when I finished highschool I celebrated it with my first trip to Northcape in the north of Norway. Many trips followed, and I tried to make all my free time into long holidays.

All my trips are on my website, but my last trips were last year with a 4,5 month trip to Iceland (before getting there I cycled a bit in Germany and zigagged through Denmark) and a 2,5 month trip to the north of Spain

See  http://www.jkoelstra.nl/statistyk/lan.html or for more details http://www.jkoelstra.nl/statistyk/km%20som.html.

Difficult to say, there are so many nice places! But If I must make a top three of nicest (cycling) countries it wil contain Iceland, Morocco and Albania.

Again, difficult to pick one.
Once in Norway I had a broken carrier that needed welding. So I went to a blacksmith. He could repair my biyicle, but the tools he needed were on a building site somewhere else and would not come back for a week. I did not like to wait for one week, so to speed him up I offered a quarter liter flask of whisky that I had bought taxfree on the ferry to Norway. The result was amazing: He phoned his employee on the building site and told him to bring the tools immediately! One hour later the tools arrived and my bicycle was repaired in very short time :-)

An other time in Moldova I was invited to stay the night with a family. Several of their friends and neighbours were informed and it resulted in a big party with quite a bit of alcohol (this is not unusual in this part of the world). One of the guests was a former sportsman who had played in the national Russian team when Moldova was still a part of the Sovjet Union. He was named "the General" by everybody. To prove his title he offered me a militairy escort of 4 man on motorcycles for the next day to bring me safely to the border...

See the map on the right for this years plan (I think it is more clear than a whole bunch of words). I expect to be cycling from the end of februari to octobre (maybe even november, but then I have to make some more loops in the plan, for instance include Tunesia) and cover something like 24.000-27.000 km in this trip.