Hello, thanks for taking the time to stop by.

This journal is a bit of a trip down memory lane for me (and perhaps even for you too). It is about a bicycle tour that I started eight years ago, when I set off from the Eiffel Tower on a mission to try and circumnavigate the entire planet using only my bicycle and boats. Without wanting to give anything away (SPOILER ALERT!!!) it did turn out to be a pretty f*cking awesome experience.

So I have decided to republish my journal from the trip online here, and I'm going to do it in a sort of real-time manner, so that each post will come exactly eight years after it actually happened. This might enhance the reading experience for you if you want to follow it, and will certainly be easier for me in terms of checking everything through before I publish it. 

If you can't wait that long to find out what happens next, I must shamelessly add that I have also turned the experience into a series of three books, which you can find on Amazon by searching for my name (or for No Wrong Turns, Into the Sunrise, and Different Parts of Everywhere if you prefer). I'm also still blogging occasionally on my own website, www.chrispountneyadventures.com, about my new adventures, if you have the time later.

But enough about the present!  That's not what I'm here to talk about. No, I'd like to take you back to the past, to a time when corona was just a Mexican beer and TikTok was just a noise old clocks made, to a time when  One Direction topped the charts and Phil Jageilka played for England, and everything felt possible. It was the summer of 2013, and I had a bicycle, and I had my dreams...