We passed the 3000km mark today, somewhere on a busy road travelling east towards Novi Sad. It’s been intense, and we still have a long way to go before we get to Istanbul by the 8th of May. But it’s a milestone passed.
Our world is surprisingly domestic a lot of the time. Our time off the bike is focused on making a base for the evening, making food, fetching water, washing, fixing things, keeping things tidy. Then packing it all back up again in the morning.
Part of my mind is always aware of what food we have, what I can conjure out of it and what I would like to cook if I happened to come across the correct ingredients.
We need to food shop often. When we shop, we sometimes do it in two waves. I’ll go in for the bulk of it, no basket – if I can’t carry it it won’t go in the panniers. I’ll come out and remember the ‘essential’ ingredient that will make a can of kidney beans worth eating. So Jamie will go in, and come out bearing all the goodies that I’d hoped he wouldn’t be able to resist.
Everything gets wedged in the bags as best we can until the next opportunity to carefully repack. Most days you’ll find me at some point with all our food spread out around me working out which combination of things in which tupperware will be the most efficient use of space.
I try to keep all the food in one front pannier, with a few exceptions. Eggs, obviously, go in with my clothes. Milk, Jamie carries. Snacks tend to go anywhere they’ll fit as they won’t last long. Avocados, or other particularly squishy fruit go in a bar bag.
The routine on the bike has changed over time. The gaps between stops are longer, and the feeding stops less frequent. On the hottest days we spent longer on our lunchtime stop, snoozing/ bird watching in the shade.
A couple of weeks ago, when we were in Passau we recalculated our journey and discovered we had a bit further to go and a bit less time than we’d thought. We talked about trains, we worked out how far we needed to do each day. 110km if we wanted a day off a week. I said I couldn’t do that. And then found that I could.
Somehow, without vocal agreement, we started doing 120-140km days more regularly.
We discovered yesterday, as we were shepherded into Serbia (rather than Croatia as planned) by armed police, that we needed to recalibrate our route again. It’s now crept up to 115km per day.
Knowing we have to get as far as we can each day is hard. I try to think about the minimum we need to do, and use that as our goal, but it’s tempting to just keep pushing further and faster. Sometimes that’s fine, and goodness knows I need the training, but I’m finding that there’s a sweet spot where you are cruising, you’re making progress, you’ve got time to enjoy the ride and the scenery and it’s almost no effort to keep pedalling.
Almost.