This is actually it

Yep, we are outta here. This has been a long time coming but finally, it looks like we are soon to head off on our slow and winding tour of the world.

As Beck mentions in her post, we’ve planned for this more seriously since our 2019 trip to see family in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. In fact, we’d done a few cycle touring trips together before this and, despite really enjoying what we do for work, had often said how we’d prefer to just carry on cycle touring, as each tour came to an end. Then, on our trip down the west coast of France, two chance encounters shaped our thinking on whether we could do this longer term. Firstly, we met an Australian couple who set off on a one year ride after getting married. What a honeymoon! Only when we met them, it was their tenth year of riding together. They just never stopped. Secondly, we met a family of four, cycling together from the southernmost tip of Spain to the northernmost tip of Scandinavia. I am not great at aging kids but they were tiny and they were riding their own bikes! Their parents admitted that the Pyrenees were a challenge but we were dumbfounded. Together, these encounters showed us that it is possible for us not to return home after each trip. We too could just keep going.

That global pandemic thing changed plans somewhat, as I ended up doing a PhD when all my work as a mechanical musical installation maker for festivals ceased, but I am soon to finish that and the long and daunting task of ‘opting out’ is well underway.

We’ll cover all that in some future posts…