day 10

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Barcelona!

Image
The longest leg of my trip has ended. 1,255 kilometers, from Zurich to Barcelona. In total I've done somewhere between 1,600 and 1,700 miles. About the distance of Charlottesville VA (my permanent residence) to Denver CO.  The first leg of my journey, Kranj, Slovenia to Vienna was such a shit show--poor sleep, inconsistent mileage--that I was spooked for the remainder of the trip and was overly conservative on planning.  From Zurich to Barcelona I really hit my stride and was doing 100+ kilometer days every day no problem and had gotten really efficient at camping.  I don't know how people camp occasionally. I did some math and I slept outside/wild camped about four days for every one day I used Warm Showers (cyclist social network for free lodging) and Hostels. I've essentially wild camped exclusively on the road and found indoor options when I was in cities and twice during bouts of rain.  I really like cities though so I extended in almost every major ...
Read more

On traveling frugally vs extremely frugally.

Image
This is basically just a WhatsApp conversation I had with one of my previous hosts that I edited and adapted to a post.  First an aside: Here's a picture of an abandoned building in Switzerland. There are so few abandoned buildings in Slovenia, Austria and Switzerland. When I tour in the United States and even in Japan, I went into a lot of abandoned buildings and houses. Becky gets annoyed because I'm always pulling off the road to jump through a window.  Ok, back to the original post: So I went around a month dirtbagging it --spending no money on lodging or transport, sleeping under bridges, park benches, even one rich person's ski condo balcony when they weren't home etc-- I'm now being much more proactive finding warmshowers hosts and infilling with inexpensive Airbnbs and hostels. I even booked a train to allow me to get further and see more things....gasp. This was is much more pleasant and still frugal! But, I had fun trying the former as sort of ...
Read more

Day 1 Shenanigans

Image
Got to the CVille airport and my bike box was 1.5 pounds (71.5#) over the 50-70# weight tier and they said it was going to cost $400! Bex and ripped the box open and the took out my hammock and hacky sack and got the package to 69.5#. the gate agent was very kind and hooked us up with packing tape to get the box reclosed. was supposed to get into Ljubljana in the morning, but my flight from DC to Frankfort got delayed and i missed my connection. so I went from an hour layover to roughly 3 hours. not a big deal, I still got in around 2pm. TSA had opened my bike box. But they packed it back OK. I rebuilt the bike and repacked outside the airport entrance. It's such a small peaceful airport. it was only an 18 km ride to the festival. but put in the wrong address and got lost in the forest. I'm sure glad I put bigger tires on my bike because I was doing fire roads, then single track, then I was bushwacking 🫣 it was a sweaty muddy mess and doubled my trip ti...
Read more