On the right path (I hope)

I am happy to be doing this. It's tough and I'm completely out of my comfort zone, but I feel like I'm on the right path, whatever that may be.

My mind believes that if I travel the world, getting an in-depth feel for each place, then by the end of it I'll know where to settle (at least for a while).

Somewhere deep down though, I already know what this place looks like: It is warm and foreign, and the streets are alive at night with people and food and lights (this sounds like Asia). I want to be immersed in this place and to speak the language. I would have just one or two close friends, and for work I would do something solitary, like writing, or teaching private English lessons. This is my 'vision', which I hope lies somewhere along (or at the end of) this trip.

For the moment though, I'm in a messy, 'working things out' stage, where all cards are thrown on the table, and I get to look at each one before building a hand. I hope this is true anyway!

Back in reality

Now, I'm in a hostel in Bordeaux, recovering from a personal record of 350km cycled over six days (from Nantes), which means my average daily distance has doubled (from the previous sixteen days) to 58km per day!

Here is my latest route:

A screenshot of France on the maps.me app, where location pins show my route from Cherbourg to Bordeaux.

Sleeping in a fridge

The cold weather has been tough. I need to be in my sleeping bag by sundown (around 6pm) just to stay warm, the air I blow into my mattress shrinks in the night so I wake up touching the ground, and my fingers go numb while packing up in the morning.

Here is my frosted bike one morning:

My tiger bike, lying on the grass, with a white layer of frost all over it. The grass is also frosty.

What I need, is one more person telling me it's the wrong time of year to go camping: I deeply agree!

Hopefully these hardships will help me appreciate the easier parts of the trip when (or if!) they come.

On a positive note

All the hostels I've stayed in (for my rest days) have offered free, self-service breakfasts, which has allowed me to recoup a large portion of the room costs by consuming three persons worth of cereal, jam baguettes, fruit and hot chocolate. The staff must wonder: What happened? Where did all the food go? And I am sitting at a table, covered in crumbs, eyes glazed over, looking guilty...

Another luxury has been snoozing in the midday sun, in a field or on a park bench, while listening to the sound of wind in the surrounding trees and birds singing. With my eyes closed, I wonder how I must look: Do mothers in the villages tell their children not to look at the strange man? But the warmth of the sun on my face is too enjoyable for me to care.

Where are you going next?

In about ten days, I'm due to spend a couple of nights with a friend in San Sebastián (in the north-east of Spain), but since it's only 260km away, I will either have to travel slowly or find some distractions along the way.

The weekend after that, I'm also meeting my mum and her boyfriend in Bilbao, only 120km from San Sebastián, so I won't be covering much ground over the next three weeks!