February 5, 2024
Barcelona to Nice, another way
Rachael and I are holed up in our La Quinta motel room in Carlsbad for two or three days, waiting for the atmospheric river that’s terrorizing California to move on and for conditions to improve enough for us to safely resume our drive north to Portland. It’s too wet to want to venture outside, so with our departure for Barcelona less than three weeks away it’s as good a time as any to crack open a new book for a quick peek inside the cover. While Rachael’s busy loading fifty or sixty routes to the Garmins I’ll set the stage for what lies ahead.
Two years ago we set off from Barcelona to Nice on a nearly nine month journey, a ‘Schengen Shuffle’ that maximized our stay in Europe by breaking it up with three months in the United Kingdom. It didn’t go exactly the way we pictured when we started out, but the overview maps we published at the time were at least reasonably close to where we ended up. At the time this was the longest tour by far we’d ever taken, and we thought it unlikely we’d take such a long one again.
We were wrong. We’re back with another nine month odyssey after all, and one that’s even a little longer than the previous one. And like last time, we’re flying in to Barcelona and expect to fly home from Nice: Barcelona to Nice, another way. This time is quite different though, especially in that the entire first three months will be in Spain as opposed to last time, when we spent only about two weeks in Spain before crossing the Pyrenees into France. Here’s what the plan looks like this time:
So, that’s the plan. Just the usual fare from Team Anderson: a credit card tour (i.e., no camping), and an itinerary with lots of reasonably short days and frequent multi-day layovers that will give us flexibility to work around adverse weather and other issues that are bound to come up with nine months on the road, and to let us take our time to enjoy ourselves, take in hikes, enjoy more challenging day rides without our luggage, and look around for a few birds. And as usual, we’ve booked nearly the entire tour - everything up through early October in La Rochelle, where we stopped for now because we want to wait to see what autumn is like in southern France this year before committing ourselves. And as we did last time, we’re going to break the tour into three separate journals just because it feels more coherent and easier to manage.
It should be amazing, and we can’t wait to get started. We hope you’ll join us - virtually, by following along and sharing your thoughts along the way, and even in real life if you see we’ll be in your vicinity and you’d like to meet up for a drink, a meal, or a ride.
Oh - and about the seven year itch in the title that you’re undoubtedly dying for an explanation of. It’s hard to believe now that we’re going into our seventh year of this vagabond experience. And it’s six years to the day, coincidentally. On this day six years ago we were sleeping on the floor of our furniture-less condo on the last night before we moved into our first Airbnb while the realtors prepared our home for showing.
When we stepped out the door into this new stage of our lives six years ago, we viewed it as a three year experiment. We had three years of potential tours sketched out and an open-mindedness as to whether we’d want to continue it beyond that or resettle somewhere. Three years later we more or less recommitted for another three years, and now here we are again. I don’t think either of us feels any closer to putting down roots now than we did when we started, so only time will tell when or where we’ll get off the merry-go-round.
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