My dad's most regularly told anecdote - even more so than the time he hospitalised himself spilling a vat of boiling soup into his welly or when he reversed a CND van with a cardboard warhead strapped onto it into a police car - is from 1973 when, at the age of 20, he cycled from Enfield to Venice.
With the flat fields of France beyond and having realised that the Saint Gotthard pass is quite tall, he grabbed onto the back of a passing truck and was pulled drag-lift style hundreds of metres up to the top of the mountain where he overtook the none-the-wiser lorry driver and glided on his way.
Over the next five decades this pilgrimage to Italy's answer to Birmingham had remained a formative moment in his life and, as his 70th birthday approached, one whose path he wanted to retread.
What better opportunity to do so than with me and my brother the month before my 30th birthday, making the slightly shortened 500mile ride from Geneva to Venice a joint 100th birthday trip?
Planning our adventure began four months before our end of July departure and fell primarily to Louis, whose work as a teacher and older brother perfectly equips him with the skills to plot a route and work out how to get our bikes to and from the Continent.
The rough path we opted for ran from Tunbridge Wells in Kent to Geneva, via trains a ferry, and then from the Swiss capital round the famous lake, over the Alps and across northern Italy into Venice, where we would meet our mother for a scorching hot two days traipsing around the Biennale art festival.
The first major obstacle that confronts anyone attempting such a trip is figuring out how to get pannier-ladened bikes onto various forms of public transport. Getting to Dover is easy enough as non-foldable bikes are allowed on UK trains outside of rush hour, leaving you to glide past miles of backed up cars at the port and into the bowels of a (non PNO) ferry.
A short peddle through Calais gets you to the TGV station, where bikes have to be broken down and placed into large bags. Doing so is fairly simple with the right tools and time.
If your train's platform flashes up just ten minutes before departure at Paris' Gare De Lyon, and the conductor insists that the bikes are bagged at the very end of the train, then you'll be left sprint-hauling impossible quantities of luggage and Carre Forre brown sacks to carriage 18 to the official calls of 'allez allez'.
Italians are, of course, very considerate when it comes to supplying large bike compartments on regional trains, and cycle space on easyJet flights is not overly expensive.
With all of these logistical problems dealt with, the only real concern I had was whether, having not cycled a bike for several months, I would be able to manage the 50 miles a day in 35C temperature required to complete our journey.
In truth while the journey was long, if the pace is slow enough, the ice cream breaks regular and the music keeping the tempo, then the going is fine. In fact, it is better than that. I am a complete convert to cycling holidays.
There is no greater joy than whizzing along a cycle path down the length of the Rhone valley with the morning sun shining on your back or nearly breaching the 40mph mark as you come down the other side of a mountain for a full, uninterrupted hour of descent.
Nothing in my life has been quite as satisfying as satiating the enormous thirst built up by cycling across the parched industrial estates of northern Italy with litres of cold iced tea or resting with a coffee and croissant in a quiet town square. The many refreshing, non-sewage filled lakes we stopped-off for dips are also memorable.
One of the many wonderful things about a cycling holiday is its low cost - both in terms of finances and on the environment.
While we did - to our shame - fly back from Venice to the UK, the carbon footprint of our ferry trip and nuclear-power fuelled TGV ride across France on the way to Geneva was relatively small. Booked well enough in advance, the cost of transport with bikes was around £300 for the whole trip.
Strapping a tent to the back of your bike also means a lengthy two-week holiday can be done for a fraction of the usual price. On several nights we ventured up rivers and into secluded looking bits of woodland to wild camp.
The practice is not completely without risk and is, according to several people we meet along the way, of varying degrees of illegal depending on what country you are in.
France seems to offer the practice a Gallic shrug. On one night we chanced our arm in the latter country, finding a beautiful spot by a coursing river where we pitched our tents and washed in the water come the morning.
At other times the days' cycling proved too exhausting for us to do anything but seek out a proper place to rest and wash our clothes. To this end Airbnb remains the easiest, usually cheapest and most reliable way to find a home with just a few hours notice.
In Milan Riccardo welcomed us into his enormous home, a converted car storage point that he'd renamed The Bike Garage. For those without bikes, two classic cycles to explore the Italian fashion capital stood by the door.
For those with them, being able to trundle the bikes and panniers straight off the road into the ground floor flat and jump straight into one of the two rainfall showers is a great way to begin your stay. A massive table for map reading and a curved television were two of the other luxuries on offer.
Other mornings we woke and found ourselves unsure of the cycle ahead, having been disheartened by a hard and hot end to the day before.
On one such day Airbnb's new Category feature - which was designed to confront over tourism complaints made about the company and suggests possible alternative locations - led us to Trento, a beautiful town with a sleek campus on its edge made up of cheap but modern flats. We managed to bundle into one of these five minutes before the Lionesses' historic final victory kicked off.
In terms of anecdotes, it's hard to argue that anything happened that can quite rival my dad's yarn. Along the way we picked up some potential contenders, including the moment a long snake fell from a branch into the water right beside me as I paddled downstream.
Washing ourselves in a torrential alpine waterfall as we reached the peak of the 2,008m Simplon Pass after four hours of constant climbing was difficult to forget.
So too is hearing Alessia Russo's back-heeled goal against Sweden on 5Live while washing the dishes in a football pitch's sprinkler, a huge thunderstorm flashing overhead.
We have agreed our favourite character of the holiday was an Italian man on a bicycle who, after shouting 'schnell' (which means quickly) at us presumably believing we were German, showed us to a lorry park where we could wild camp - ending a miserable and increasingly desperate search for a pitch after a long day's cycle.
He just pips the three happy-looking wild boar who oinked their way into our paths as we ate an ice cream on the banks of Lake Como.
The three of us finally reached our destination after our longest days cycle, exhausted and more tanned than we thought genetically possible.
As we stood on the bridge leading from the mainland into Venice, a German woman who we'd passed earlier struggling to weave her way through the mess of motorways leading to the city of water wooped 'ja, I have made it!"
