After the third time her partner Art had spent part of his summer holiday cycling from Amsterdam to her house in Rome, novelist Rosita Steenbeek shifted from a "rather you than me" attitude to feeling that it would be nice to share this experience with him next time. To realise a childhood dream, she proposed Delphi as the destination for their joint trip, and Art got busy on the internet and with his tame cycle mechanic, putting together the perfect pink touring bike for her.

Although this book has the format of the typical "journey log" travel book, with a chapter a day, full of routes, distances, elevations and stopovers, bad weather, bad roads, mechanical trouble, finding hotels with space for bikes and veggie-friendly restaurants, and all the rest of it, it often feels more like a novel in disguise, because the thing that really interests the author about the journey is the way the relationship between "Rosita" and "Art" develops and deepens in the course of it. The view is ironic and detached, but very penetrating, so the reader is made to think of them like characters in a novel rather than like the normally rather opaque figures of a mainstream travel story, or the deeply pessimistic, lonely traveller of typical (male) literary travel writing. There are bitter arguments with shouting and gesticulating and riding off in different directions, often alarming but also gloriously comical, but they always end in reconciliation.

But we do get plenty of scenery as well, as the two of them head through Germany and Switzerland and down the Adriatic coast of Italy to the Brindisi ferry, as well as local history, churches, fruit, Art's bike component addiction, and a few interesting people met along the way. And it's also an entertaining account of what it's like for a not-especially-athletic and not-especially-young person to move outside their comfort zone and find that they can cope surprisingly well with doing something you might think of as more appropriate for a student vacation. A nice blast of summer to read this in the middle of winter! ( )