Slovenian Alps Self-Guided Motorcycle Tour

Eleven nights with three free days at Lake Bohinj, self-guided, which makes this the most Slovenia-focused tour in the range.

The Champagne region, the Black Forest and the Austrian Tyrol come first on the way east, with the B500, the Rhine Falls, the Bregenzerwaldstrasse and the Arlberg Pass, then Bohinj over the Gerlos, the Krimml waterfalls, the Grossglockner and the Wurzen Pass.

The three free days are the heart of it. One covers the Savica waterfalls and the Vogel cable car, or Lake Bled and the Vintgar Gorge, a wooden walkway pinned to the rock above a river. Another is the Vrsic Pass, fifty cobbled hairpins built by prisoners of war in 1915, with Kranjska Gora, Bovec and Tolmin on the loop. The third runs to the Postojna caves, where the olm salamander lives in the water, or Predjama Castle, built into the mouth of a cave, or Ljubljana. Corvara and Sils follow on the way home.

Eleven nights of bed and breakfast, seven evening meals and the return Eurotunnel crossing are included, along with the GPX routes and the itinerary; fuel, parking, admissions and the vignettes are not. Twelve days with three of them in one place is the right shape for a country the size of Wales with that much good road in it. The Vrsic cobbles want care in the wet, and Slovenia costs rather less than Austria or Switzerland once the bike is there, which goes some way to offsetting the three days of riding needed to reach it.