So no, friends, after seven years on the road we aren’t really committing ourselves to another seven.  Given our advancing ages, our various health issues and the precarious state of the world we can’t really commit to the even the coming year.

We do still feel committed to travel though and don’t feel at all drawn to settling down in one or two places any time soon.  I suspect we’ll continue to travel in whatever form still works well for us as long as we can, and that our travel will still be focused around biking and hiking.  But it will definitely be travel in a different style and at a different pace than when we began this odyssey seven years ago.

So think of this more as a rebranding of the team than as an actual plan.  Our tours in the coming years will be quite different from that first year when we biked from Dubrovnik to Barcelona and then flew off to Taiwan for an additional month before finally returning to America.  Some differences you can expect:

• Long, arduous A to B journeys that string together one night stands where we sleep in a different place nearly every night are out.  As much as we look back with pride and amazement at our tour of the French Alps when we crossed nearly 30 passes in 30 days, those days are long gone.  Even if we still could do something like that, we don’t want to.
• In its place, we’re moving to more of a slow travel model - fewer and easier travel days, broken up with longer stays in bases that let us explore a region in more depth through day rides and hikes, preferably lodged in one bedroom apartments where we can close the door of the bedroom and get some privacy.
• Locked-in itineraries where we’ve booked the entire tour in advance are out, and flexible ones are in.  No more having to choose between scrambling to cancel a batch of reservations or riding out unpleasant weather conditions and risking another bout of pneumonia.  In our ideal vision, we’ll book the initial and ending hotels so we have a plan for managing arrival and departure, but leave everything in between open and flexible and just book as we go.  We’ll travel with a plan and a vision, but adapt it to circumstances.
• Eating in restaurants every night is out, and a more flexible approach to meals is in.  We’re still working our way into what this looks like, but I suspect we’ll evolve into something like we’ve been doing in Tucson this winter where we more or less alternate restaurant meals with ones at home where Rachael enjoys leftovers or we pick up something from the market or she prepares a simple stir-fry.

That being said though we’ve actually got a plan in place for this year, one that’s pretty well developed at the front end and gets more visionish than real at the back end.  It’s a blueprint but not a commitment, and one we’re both excited about.  We’ll walk you through it in the next series of posts.