They consider hiring a boat for a sea cruise but remember various disasters when they’ve tried that before, at which point Harris suggests a cycling tour of Germany. It opens in the same way as Boat, with the same three chaps chatting and realising they need a break from their everyday lives. It was published in 1900, eleven years after his most famous work, Three Men in a Boat and features the exact same three characters – ‘J’ the narrator, George and Harris – 11 years further on, when two of them (J and Harris) have gotten married and had children. Is Three Men on The Bummel a sequel to Three Men in a Boat? The American edition of the novel avoided this obscurity by being titled simply Three Men on Wheels. But on the whole we have had a pleasant time, and are sorry when ’tis over.’īummel is a German word, appropriately enough since the book describes a cycling tour around Germany. We have been much interested, and often a little tired. We nod and smile to many as we pass with some we stop and talk awhile and with a few we walk a little way. But long or short, but here or there, our thoughts are ever on the running of the sand.

Sometimes it is through busy streets, and sometimes through the fields and lanes sometimes we can be spared for a few hours, and sometimes for a few days. ‘A “Bummel”,’ I explained, ‘I should describe as a journey, long or short, without an end the only thing regulating it being the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started. I wish this book to be a strict record of fact, unmarred by exaggeration… What is ‘the Bummel’?ĭeliberately, but oddly, the book doesn’t explain what a Bummel is until the very last paragraph, where J, the narrator, writes:

Jerome k jerome three men on the bummel