There's a cliche that says that a journey starts with a single footstep, and while that's true in some respects, where it really starts is with the the initial idea, the plan, the concept, the vision. To have a grand plan for an adventure is to take a step away from normal life, but to follow through with such a thing takes courage, knowing that you're leaving a more predictable existence behind.

When I left my home in Wales and started cycling, more than three years and 65,000km ago, I was looking for a route to follow. I didn't have the confidence back then to pioneer my own route, but I did have some criteria for it:

- Not too hard

- Mostly off road and mostly on dirt roads

- Mostly pedalable on a loaded bike

- Away from the obvious and busy places

- No 'pointless' climbing, (by that I mean if there's a way around a hill, on dirt, that's not much longer than going over the hill, then use the easier option)

- The difficulty should be in the distance rather than the technical/rough riding.

- Use quiet lanes or traffic free options as well.

In short, a route that could be ridden and enjoyed for months at a time, without the need for weeks off to recover in between from it's severity.

Europe has lots of bikepacking routes, and potential for many more. In fact, in lots of ways it has more potential than most other places in the planet due to a few things:

- Many thousands of years of continuous civilisation

- Differing access policies from county to country, but mostly quite lenient for bike access

- Diverse cultures and geography

- Relatively small size

- Great transport links

I found that what was missing were easier and longer routes. As I rode a few of the more established bikepacking routes throughout my first year I was finding that they increasingly didn't fit my criteria. That’s not too say that they are bad routes, just not to my preference. Mostly this was due to them being too hard or having too many pointless climbs. I don't personally need to go to a shop or have somewhere official to sleep everyday, and once I've gained some elevation, I like to keep it for a while if I can.

So after a sustained period of feeling that there was some kind of disconnect between my goals as a dirt road tourist and the designers of these routes, I started asking more people like myself what they thought of the routes they rode. A lot of them, I was finding, had similar experiences. I discovered there was a need for these longer, more dirt road touring style routes, similar to the Great Divide MTB route, that spawned the Tourdivide race.

All of a sudden I found myself looking at a blank page….or should I say an un-marked map. Which was momentarily daunting until I realized the obvious solution. I had a huge back-catalogue of ride routes from three years of bouncing around the continent in every direction. Time to flick through them, zoom in for the detail, zoom out for the bigger picture. Can they be stitched together to make a European version of the Tour Divide? The point being to make something new, something that fit my criteria, but also something that I could share.

Breaking it into northern, central and southern sections made sense to me. The endless Taiga forest in the North may seem monotonous from a satellite or map view, but once you’re in it you find a surprising variation of riding. There are mountains and valleys in amongst the trees.

Central Europe is like playing a game of Connect Four : piecing together a route through the patchwork of possibilities. Single-track, then farm road, a forest road leading into a hamlet and then onto a cycle track before peeling off through a field and into a forest again, to be repeated until you're dizzy with turning after turning, amazed at the variety of the places you pass through.

In the south high plateau turns to brushy scrubland, into dry farmland, then through the unexpected delights of gorges and mountain ranges. The south is wilder than you might expect, emptier than the maps might say, more varied than a dry environment has a right to be.

The book that had the greatest influence on me is called ‘Clear Waters Rising’, by Nicholas Crane. It's a travel book about a walk the author undertook from Cape Finisterre in north western Spain to Istanbul in the late 1980s, completely under his own power. He used no vehicles, but also no lifts or escalators either, and certainly no cable cars when he climbed Mont Blanc in the winter.

It inspired me to try and look at travel my own way. It has been three years of trial and error doing that on my bike across Europe. To find the routes that fit my criteria I found myself going places other people don’t and living an existence on the edge of civilization. It’s now time bring it all together. So from Grense Jakobselv in Norway, with its border with Russia and the Arctic Ocean, to Cabo St Vincente in Portugal on the Atlantic coast I tried to filter out some of the highlights, to make some sort of backbone to what will become The European Divide Trail.