We have just left Blighty for the second time on our tour. This time it feels different. It feels more ‘real’ as we don’t have a plan to return soon, as we did when we headed to Norway, knowing we’d be back in a few months’ time.
We are aiming for Morocco, after a trip across northern Spain to visit my brother, sister-in-law, and our many nephews in south west France. Beyond Morocco plans get very vague. We have half an idea we will make it to the Global Bike Bus Summit in Lisbon in spring 2026 but there’s also a chance we will choose to head further south in Africa, east across Europe, or even across the Atlantic. Who knows?
The point is that this represents a greater departure from ‘home’ than we’ve made yet and it’s filling us with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. In fact, it’s hard to put our finger on exactly what we are feeling, but we both had a similar emotional response to our leaving Plymouth today. Our emotions are often closely aligned. I guess that’s becoming more and more the case as we live our weird entwined and symbiotic lifestyle.
Tomorrow we will disembark in Santander, a place we’ve been through before when making similar crossings, but this time it’s more of a portal to wider travels than it has been in the past. Actually, I have travelled fairly extensively in Spain, when Interrailing in my late teens, and I am looking forward to revisiting many of those places with Beck. We also keep reminding ourselves that we’ve been travelling for nearly five months now (which feels wild in itself) and that this next phase will include precisely what we have been looking forward to most (different cultures, people, flora & fauna, and sounds) but nonetheless, it has brought some emotions to the fore that we hadn’t yet experienced on our tour.
Obviously the aim of giving away our possessions and selling our house was never to go on a brief tour of Norway and Scotland but—sitting on this ferry to Santander—it’s fair to say that ‘shit got real’.