The 2016 bike trip

Summer 2016: Nelson had been liv­ing in Kraków for a year now. His EVS pro­ject hav­ing fin­ished and Leon’s hol­i­days lay­ing ahead again, there was anoth­er pos­sib­il­ity of trav­el­ling long and far. No ques­tion that we’d mount the bikes again! This time we were three, as Nelson’s old friend Jorge joined us for part of the trip, wav­ing good­bye to old Europe before mov­ing to California. Our path was to cross the Alps, our des­tin­a­tion Rome, our object­ive: to say hello to the Pope.

The start was sup­posed to be Paris, how­ever, the cheap flights from Madrid sent Nelson and Jorge to Nantes. Years later, Leon (whose sched­ule did­n’t per­mit the earli­er start and who rode in to Paris by bus) still has to listen to their stor­ies of how phant­ast­ic that leg of the trip was, seem­ingly full of noth­ing but castle stays and sur­prise parties.

From Paris we raced towards Switzerland, long days on a rather straight line. The plan was to get to Lausanne, from where would Jorge leave us, send­ing his bike home by mail. We part a day and a town earli­er, how­ever, when in Pontarlier we’re receiv­ing a great num­ber of dif­fer­ent invit­a­tions by Swiss hosts in dir­ec­tions abso­lutely not lead­ing towards Lausanne.

Our Switzerland turns out to be a uniquely strange place even by our bound­less stand­ards. Bizarrely gen­er­ous hosts and strangers, the out­land­ish green of happy cows“ pas­tures and our mem­or­able night rides only served as pro­logue to the great big mis­sion that Nelson had insisted on, trad­ing all oth­er route decisions against this one and only: To climb the Grand Saint-Bernard, the biggest and mean­est pass of note in the entire bloody Alps. The only great pas­sage there with more than 2000 metres of alti­tude to cov­er from bot­tom to top.

Mountains remained our com­pan­ions. In Italy we cross the Apennines not once, not twice, but three times, because once on the Southern side we remembered we wanted to vis­it a friend in Bologna, hav­ing to cross back and forth again. It’s all fun and games in the French-speak­ing part of Europe, but in Italy we fell on some hard times occa­sion­ally, even hav­ing two or three truly dread­ful nights after days full of get­ting lost uphill, hun­ger, argue­ing and gen­er­al hope­less­ness. Finding hosts can be quite hard, too, in a coun­try whose smal­lest vil­lage is still known world-wide and over­run with tour­ists. At least the weath­er played along – on the whole trip there was a single truly rainy day, and so on the many occa­sions we stran­ded on some ran­dom road- or sea­side we would­n’t both­er to raise the tent any­more and just drop down on the spot.

Eventually, fun times returned. In Firenze we felt like we were back to old shape again. Finally everything was right again – but the unreal world star­ted to intrude into our thoughts again (noth­ing feels more vividly real than such a jour­ney, and I’m sure that if one life is a dream it must be the every­day one, that in which whatever unex­pec­ted thing may change everything by tomor­row, how­ever dull the small-scale events of life and work are; while our bike trips are reli­ably ruled by the steady rhythm of go-to-the-next-place, how­ever bizarre the escal­at­ing adven­tures with­in that sol­id frame may turn out). Nelson in par­tic­u­lar needed a flat and a job as soon as pos­sible after his return to Kraków – so by then he star­ted to feel he really needed to return as soon as pos­sible, too. And yet to still see Rome, of course! No time for Tuscany, bet­ter: to race and spend a few days in the cap­it­al. Leon needed a slower pace, and so we split for a short while; Nelson head­ing out via Arezzo at 150 kilo­metres a day, Leon slowly saun­ter­ing towards Siena.

Those last days sure kept us thrilled. We met again in Rome, Nelson hav­ing arrived two days before Leon, both of us hav­ing been hunted by boars and, in Nelson’s case, hav­ing col­lided with one. We did get to meet the Pope and we did get to explore the city togeth­er. Then Nelson took the soon­est train instead of the next best more than a week later, and ended up not regret­ting it, but indeed find­ing flat and job right after his return.

 

This trip was­n’t as unique any­more as the first – but per­haps more of a life changer for both of us, though we could­n’t have known at the time (hence excuse the sappy pathos, please). The paths we’ve taken since, Nelson’s as a pro­gram­mer and Leon’s as a paint­er and print­maker, both had their defin­it­ive begin­nings in these days between absinthe and Alps.