A few discussions have begun about cycling destinations for next year (2009); I wanted to collect all of this information together and add another suggestion of my own.

After the success of the two days of the "EF Alpine Roadie Adventure" last July organized by litespeed (see the threads for Day 1 and Day 2), some of the participants talked about repeating the wonderful experience next year - either returning to the Andermatt region or going down to Graubunden to do some new Alpine passes. That would certainly be great, and midweek (to avoid traffic) during July or August (to increase the likelihood of reasonable weather at 2,500m altitude) would be prime times for this.

The Tour de France will have an epic penultimate stage finishing at the top of the classic Mont_Ventoux in 2009. The 2009 Etape_du_Tour is using this stage as the one that 8,000 amateur riders will do one week before the tour arrives. However, that event is notoriously difficult to get into, so hillseeker and some others are considering going down to climb Ventoux at some other time during the summer (see this post and others in that thread).

If you don't fancy riding up and down mountains all day long, then a flatter option that has been discussed is the London-Edinburgh-London 1400km Endurance Cycling Event, which is being discussed in this thread. This event is only held every 4 years, and it runs over 4 and a half days: July 26th-31st, 2009. There are at least a few EF members that are crazy enough to consider doing this, so why not join us?

To get ready for all this riding next summer, I'm thinking of planning an early-season training camp somewhere warm. Mallorca seems like an ideal destination (Google Maps, Wikipedia). A lot of European pro' teams use this for their winter/spring training camps. I've heard that there is a lot of great riding on pretty quiet roads as soon as you get away from the tourist resorts. The island is plenty big enough (about 100km wide) to allow for a lot of good long rides, and there are some medium-size mountains to get the climbing legs working. A trip in March could make ideal preparation for a great season of riding next year, plus accommodation should be cheap because of all the empty hotel rooms in their off-season. We'll have our new tandem bike by then, and will hopefully have figured out how to ride it, so will be looking forward to putting some serious miles onto it. It'd be great to have some more company, though.

If you have any other ideas, then please add them here. There are many mass-participation one-day rides in and around Switzerland, which are being discussed on this thread. Hopefully, we can try to keep discussion on this thread to multi-day "adventures".