I leave in two days for my first bike trip since the “great escape” coming back from a great trip in remote Chilean Patagonia in spring of 2020. When the pandemic erupted that spring we were already at the midpoint of our trip. Somehow we managed to stay one step ahead of travel closures, quarantines, and closed borders. That’s hard to do on a bicycle. We ended up on the last ferry from Chile into Argentina, the last flight out of Bariloche, and one of the last flights out of Argentina. At midnight of the evening we flew, the President of Argentina closed all the countries airports. By that time we had landed in São Paulo. However, since we were scheduled to fly into Thunder Bay, Ontario, and Canada had just closed it’s borders, we had to find new flights into Minneapolis. It was a little chaotic. We got home and quarantined ourselves into our respective homes with no idea how long it would all last.
Now I’m off to Athens with good friend Brian Bennett. There we will meet Lindsay Gault who is traveling from his home in New Zealand. We know Lindsay well from previous bike trips. Together we plan to ride across Greece, Albania, and Montenegro on the EuroVelo bike route. When we reach Split in Croatia we’ll leave the EuroVelo for more remote trails along the Adriatic Crest into Slovenia. From there we’ll pick up another set of trails through the mountains and eventually into Ljubljana and our flights home at the end of May.
We will be bikepacking throughout our trip. That means we’ll be carrying our sleeping bags, mats, cooking gear and more on our bikes. Food we’ll pick up along the way. We won’t always camp and cook by any means. The cuisine on this route is just too good to pass up and there will be lots of charming options to stay. But by carrying everything we’ll be ready to camp in all those remote places we are longing to find.
I plan to blog and post photos as often as I can as we move along. I hope you’ll join us by following along.
