The Basics

Nine months is a long time!  We couldn’t have imagined ourselves hitting the road for this long at one stretch when we first went vagabond.  The 4-1/2 months we started off with then (Dubrovnik to Barcelona, with a month in Taiwan tacked on at the end) felt like an epic adventure and really pushed our limits.  We were ready to be home at the end, and in fact came home from Taiwan two weeks earlier than we’d planned.

Last year’s long tour, the two-parter from Minneapolis to Rome, was a full five months though; and though by the end we were ready for a break, it was as much about the onset of the rainy season as homesickness.  Nine months though!  That’s a real quantum jump for us.

Well, let’s not exaggerate and over-glorify it.  It was really only 8-2/3 months.  We had another 10 days to play with but when we planned this it didn’t make much sense to stay until mid-December just because we could.  Might as well head home when it gets too cold so we can return sooner.

So how did it go?  First, a few essential metrics:

• Total cycling distance: about 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers!)
• Total cycling elevation gain: 400,000’
• Countries: 4 (Spain/Catalonia, France, England, Wales)
• Miles walked (Rachael): 900
• Accidents & injuries: none of consequence
• Illnesses: Scott: 4 days in Brittany, 4 in Provence
• CycleBlaze meetups: 12 (in order of first appearance: Rich & Robin; Susan, Suzanne and Janos; Keith; Janice & Barry; Ann & Steve; Steve & Dotie)
• Significant mechanical issues: 1 (broken derailleur)
• Lost/broken objects: 2 pair of glasses, a wallet (found), a forgotten iPad (recovered)
• Image count: 12,000 (that’s the number stored on my iPad when we left for home, not including at least twice as many that were purged along the way).
• Stays (towns we overnighted in): 133 (50 in Spring, 38 in Summer, 45 in Autumn)
• Days Ms. Exercise Addict went without any significant exercise: 12
• Trips to the LBS: tbd, still inventorying
• Flat tires: zip, zero, goose-egg, nada!!!

We still can’t quite believe that last one.

As a visual, here are composites of the actual routes we cycled:

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It wasn’t all bicycling, as you can see from the gaps here and there in these maps.  The exceptions:

• Suburban train from Barcelona to Blanes, an excellent way to avoid riding out of the city.
• Train from Perpignan to Narbonne, to avoid some heavy rain (we’re such fair weather wimps!)
• Train from Nimes to Lunel (broken derailleur)
• Ferry from Calais to Dover
• Train from Ulverston to Conwy
• Train from Conwy to Shrewsbury (to repair a broken tooth)
• Train from Bridport to Exeter, and again from Exeter to Plymouth (it’s that rain thing again)
• Ferry from Plymouth to Roscoff
• Train from St. Malo to Angouleme
• Train from Perigueux to Les Eyzies (Rain again!!  Why does this keep happening to us?)
• Train from Millau to Limoux (to meet the Fraziers!)

We biked everything shown on the maps though, so over the course of 8-2/3 months that’s pretty good.  Roughly one day a month on average where we primarily traveled by other means than the bike.  

Impressions

How does it feel, ah how does it feel?  To be on your own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone

Nine months is a long time!  Staying in 133 different hotels, guest houses and B&B’s in 260 days (almost exactly once every two days on average) is a lot of unpacking, settling in, orienting yourself to a new layout, finding your way to the bathroom in the dark in a strange place, remembering the ill-placed sill or step you might trip or break a toe on, figuring out how this coffee maker or shower or lighting system works, finding a restaurant, going to the store, consulting tomorrow’s weather forecast, plotting out and loading the next day’s ride or walk.

So how does it feel?  It feels great to be here in our apartment in Portland for ten whole days, and to look ahead to an entire month in the same place in Tucson later this winter.  After nine months of all of the above, we’re both ready for some stability.  Truth be known, we’ve been easing that way for the last few months and gradually revising our plans here and there so we could stay in places longer and get a mini-break from the flux.  It’s hard to say, but I doubt that we’ll take on quite such a long, unbroken itinerary again.  This was pushing it.

We could be on the road again for this long though, but not quite in the same way - certainly there will be the ‘normal’ three month tours such as we’ve undertaken in the last several years (the flight for next spring’s tour is already booked, btw) but I’m pretty sure that for anything very long we’ll build in longer stays to let ourselves settle in, relax, take day rides and walks, get some space from each other, and maybe even (gasp!) take a break from keeping up the blog every day.

So that’s one way it feels.

Another way it feels is that we’re getting older, and we just don’t have the reserves and strength now that we had not that many years ago.  When we look back on our trips to the French Alps and the Pyrenees we really can’t quite believe we pulled them off.  At the end of 35-40 miles on the road now we’ve often had enough fun for the day.  Pretty well gone are the years when we would bike hard all day and have the energy or enthusiasm for exploring the place we just worked so hard to get to.  It’s one of the reasons we’re gradually building in more multi-day layovers, so we’ve got something left to look around with.

It’s a balancing act that so many of us are experiencing as we age - we want to do and see more, but we have the capacity and drive to do less. We know time is running out on us and we want to make the most of what’s left us while most of the moving parts still work, but we want to pace ourselves so that it’s all rewarding and not turning into an office grind.  And in today’s world, there’s the agonizing reality that between technological changes, overpopulation and climate change the world is all rapidly changing before our eyes and we want to see or revisit places that we know will be significantly different in the years to come.

We still feel like rolling stones, but we need to roll a bit slower as time goes on and pick up some moss along the way.  

But back to the tour itself - how was it, really?  Was it good for us, what places did we especially like or dislike, were you glad you went?  

It was extraordinary, cover to cover.  Oh, my gosh.  So much happened in these nine months.  One of the best years of our lives.  It brings tears to my eyes to think back on it all - day after day of one stunning experience or place of beauty after another that we hadn’t foreseen and couldn’t have imagined.

It was interesting flying home Thursday - a moving experience, I guess you could say.  Until the battery on my iPad finally ran down and the screen went black I started working through those 12,000 images, preparing them for backup and removal from the tablet in preparation for what’s next.  My general approach is to begin at the beginning and create individual albums for each stopover of the tour - one for Barcelona, one for Tossa del Mar, one for Palamos, one for the next town I can’t remember the name of, one for Cadaques, one for Figueres, and then over the Pyrenees and on to France.  I cull through each of these, looking for duplicates or uninteresting ones I can just delete.  Each of these folders then will be transferred to its own file folder on our backup device back home.

It’s an overwhelming experience looking back through all of these images from the last nine months.  That happened!  That happened!  How could I have forgotten about this unbelievable place or event!  I keep interrupting Rachael to show her something magical that I’d forgotten about, but she’s immersed in the stream of movies that gets her through a flight and doesn’t want to be interrupted.  It feels like we’ve had a whole lifetime’s worth of experiences in these nine months.

It’s too much to reflect or comment on as a whole.  In the middle of sorting through the photos I realized I want to say a longer goodbye to this tour, and granularize the retrospective a bit.  I’ll create a separate post for each of the nine months, and pick out fifteen or so photos and a few videos from that month to reshare with you, to remind you and ourselves of just why just that one month was such an amazing time of our lives.  First up, March: Catalonia.

So feel free to stop here, because if you’ve been following along the whole time you’ve seen it all before.  Nothing new to see here, folks.  But, if you’re at all like me, you might have forgotten a thing or two and would enjoy being reminded.  It’s wet and gray and cold up here in the winter, after all.  Might as well turn on the tube and watch the re-runs.