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From Away.com
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Europe's Top Ten Bike Trips (cont.)

Provence, France
If the Loire Valley is elegance and luxury, Provence is old-world French charm on a more modest scale. People still sit around gossiping in the town square, bathed in the soft sunlight that inspired the Impressionists. The food is lighter, healthier, more Mediterranean. Wild herbs grow everywhere; even the roadside weeds smell good as you pedal by.

The Netherlands
The cyclist's two worst enemies are cars and hills. Here's a place where you can escape both. Flat as a pool table, the bike-happy Netherlands—it's the only country with more bicycles than people—is laced with paved bike paths; you can literally ride for hours without ever encountering a car. But you'll have a tough time avoiding tulips, windmills, and castles.



Pyrenees, Spain/France
For those hard-core riders who actually enjoy hills, here's the ticket. How about the Col du Tourmalet, an 11-mile-long eight-percent grade whose 4,600-foot elevation gain has defeated uncounted Tour de France riders? Think you can you hack it?

Bohemia, The Czech Republic and Slovakia
This rolling land of 15th-century villages, farms, and forests south of Prague is the ancestral home of both off-beat intellectual wanderers and the original Budweiser beer. Even better, the winding country roads you'll travel are virtually free of car and truck traffic, not to mention tourists.

Andalucia, Spain
Is it Spain or North Africa? The Moorish influence makes this part of Spain an exotic alternative to the usual European bike tours. Gypsies dance in caves here. But at the same time Andalucia and its main cities of Cordoba, Granada, and Seville epitomize traditional Spain: flamenco, gazpacho, bullfights, whitewashed hillside villages.
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