Inertia: The tendency of an object in motion to remain in motion or an object at rest to remain at rest unless acted upon by some outside force.
Ever since I left Amsterdam I'd been feeling my trip carrying itself a little out of control. Two months on the road are a long time, and the constant go-go-go pace I was living at had finally begun to get to me as I continued pushing further and further...and still, I couldn't stop.
After leaving the city of Amsterdam I (with some difficulty, because I had in no way researched a route) navigated my way down to the Hook of Holland (literally the Corner of Holland, this place is a major 90 degree bend in the Dutch coastline as well as a major ferry port). After a night camping in the woods, not even worried about being found, I bought some nectarines and other appropriate travel foods and got on a ship bound for Harwich, England.
On the boat ride, I listened to The Beatles, The Who, and every other British Invasion artist whose name shows up in my debilitatingly small iTunes library. I was glad to be excited to go somewhere; not just a name on a map to say I had visited it but a place and a culture which had drawn my interest for so long my anticipation proved enough to fill even a 6 hour ferry ride.
Beowulf.
Chaucer.
Shakespeare.
Manley-Hopkins.
Phillip Pullman.
Rock and Roll.
The Clash.
Doctor Who.
Sherlock Holmes.
Douglas Adams.
Oxford.
Harry Potter.
THE ACCENTS.
I was pretty excited to be in a place where I spoke the language, as well.
When I got off the boat I was promptly greeted by some of the greatest accents I have ever encountered, requesting the customs form I had neglected to fill out. Pushed to the side, I began a brief yet fateful conversation with a couple of people travelling on a tandem bike named Raphael (henceforth Raph) and Ariel; a frenchman and a New Yorker (now living together in Paris) who were likewise riding to London.
It didn't take long for us to decide we would ride together.
That night we rode into town, changed some money, bought some food, lost the bike route almost instantly, and began riding in more or less the direction of London. We stopped and camped right off the side of the road in a little stand of trees near a soccer field, having a little cookout on a campfire and talking about all sorts of ridiculous things. True, I was the literal third wheel on a bike trip (a very 2-wheeled sort of affair), but it was nice to be with people, and the feelings of moderate insanity I'd been feeling began to ebb.
The next morning we departed for London, realizing promptly we really had no idea how to get there and further that there was no such thing as a well signposted bike route from Harwich to Colchester to Chelmsford to London. While we didn't know exactly how we were going to get there, I did come by one piece of particularly good luck: A public book exchange in a distinctly british red phone booth in the middle of nowhere. I traded some Vonnegut (thanks Ed) for some Sherlock Holmes (thematically appropriate) and we went on our way. It was good that I found something to make this day worthwhile, because as it turns out, we weren't going to make it to London.
We got lost. A lot. We argued (I tried to remain a neutral party). We asked for a lot of directions.
We resigned ourselves to our fate and decided to camp out near Brentwood, a little ways out of the London metropolitan area that sprawls forever outward and home to Ye Olde Green Dragon Pub.
Now, I didn't want to tell my friends this, but I had only insisted we try the Green Dragon because I figured any place whose very name was a thinly veiled reference to the finest bar in the Shire (Lord of the Rings, for those readers who might not get the reference) had to be a pretty good place to be. I was right.
While the opening ceremonies could never have compared to Beijing, it was the quipping humor of the bar-inhabitants who made this experience truly worthwhile. They did indeed make several Tolkien references that I picked up on, and besides the fact that the food was pointedly mediocre relative to the price, the whole affair was quite worthwhile. When we finally had to go it was very late, and our fellows were probably a little concerned for our wellfare...still, they bid us a fine farewell, all together, and we slept in a park nearby almost immediately.
London was certainly excited for the Olympics. Innumerable people flooding the streets, the famous rings everywhere, special Olympic-traffic-only lanes on the roadways...it was just pure energy and noise and fanfare. I was glad to have a couch to sleep on in this massive city, as it may honestly be said that there is no way to see London in a day. As the three days I did spend there have sufficiently blurred, I will instead offer some vignettes of my stay: The Tate Modern, Shakespeare's Globe (Richard the III), Sunny weather, Free Festivals, Bricklane Market, street performers, Wade Meade/Jeannin, dutch brass bands, swing dancing in the streets, Platform 9 and 3/4, Bagels, Big Ben, The London Eye, and meeting the man who rode 90,000 miles in a rickshaw to see the Olympics: Chen Guanming.
A 57 year old Chinese farmer, Chen Guanming either looks much older or much younger than his age betrays. While this short, wizened, and bearded man seems to have lived a hard life, he is youthful, strong, and immensely happy. To give you some background, he was given the privilege of seeing the closing ceremonies to the Beijing Olympics due to his immense feats of garbage collection surrounding the stadium. It says a lot about a man to get famous for picking up litter, but his awesomeness continues. Apparently, he was so incredibly moved by the ceremony that he decided he would do whatever it took to make it to London 2012, and so soon began riding his formidable 3-wheeled rickshaw to Europe, doing whatever it took to make it in time for the games.
It has been hard to get an accurate accounting of his precise route, but as I understand it he crossed the Himalayas 3 times, rode his bike across Iraq, and took some massive detours en route, battling floods, typhoons, visa problems, and wars.
Leaving London was hard, as was saying goodbye to Wade, Jeannin, Raph, and Ariel, but again my inertia was carrying me forward: I couldn't convince myself to slow down and decided to push on for Paris, albiet indirectly.
From Paddington Station I got a train to Oxford, hoping to avoid some of the insane traffic and mediocre roadways that go between the two, and was glad I did. After exploring the town for some time, realizing that I'd probably be a much more motivated student if I went to Oxford, visiting a ton of bookshops (including Blackwells, the preferred bookshop of J.R.R. Tolkien himself, who had apparently run up a massive debt he may or may not have ever repaid them), failing to see Richard Dawkins or anyone particularly famous, and eating an entire tub of Ben and Jerry's in front of a rather incredulous british child, I began my ride to Bath via the Cotswalds.
England has the topography of a rumpled sheet after a restless night. The hills may not be very long or particularly frequent, but many of the climbs are impossibly steep, and so I spent rather a lot of this day pushing my bike up 20 degree inclines that my worn out gears could not possibly conquer.
There are also a lot of cows, castles, and cottages.
Bath was cool, but not as awesome as the culture of thin-canal-dwellers that existed just outside of it. These people, whose lives are condensed into 2 meter wide, entirely customized river boats are really awesome. From the brightly painted to totally camoflauged to Lord of the Rings themed boats, these people lived in a world all their own, and after riding along the canal-tow-path for about 15 kilometers, I wouldn't have minded giving it a shot. They seemed to barter for a lot of their needs, most boats offering some sort of useful service with a little sign. They had solar panels and gardens and bikes. They had cozy little homes and friendly neighbors.
After leaving the Canal, I rode somewhat indirectly to Stonehenge, then pushed south towards Poole, where I expected to get a ferry to Cherbourg, France.
After some lovely riding in the New Forest, I got to Poole, only to find that I needed to ride 100k to get my ferry the next day, and it was around there my nerves started fraying.
I was losing it.
I rode as far as I could, but eventually had to take a train to get to Portsmouth in time.
While the terrain was lovely, much of it being sunny seaside resorts or deep forests, I didn't appreciate it much at the time: I hadn't been appreciating a whole lot for quite a while, really. While it was hard to see at the time, I think in retrospect it was clear I had become destination-focused (thinking I wanted to make it to a lot of famous places) instead of process-oriented in the course of the last few weeks, and I think it was this that began my downward spiral. In any case, one cannot ride in a destination oriented way for too long before feeling like a train would be more appropriate.
Biking was never much about the destination, and it's easy to forget that.
I was homesick and lonely, wishing for the faculties of community and family and friends and just wishing to do the sorts of everyday things that make life so great at home: Rock climbing with friends, night hikes, skateboarding, snowboarding, concerts, and just being with people one cares about. I love bikes, but 2 months is a lot of riding to do without taking a break, and I had overestimated myself. Admitting that was hard.
I pushed hard and I decided to make it to Paris before making a decision on what I was to do, but I think even then I had realized that I was no longer getting what I wanted out of my great European Odyssey. I was being pushed onward by my desire to go, but what I was chasing was something intangible; something one only finds by staying in one place for a while.
I rode from Caen to Versailles in one and a half days, one of which pushed my cyclocomputer 200k closer to the 5,000 kilometer mark I still hope to reach in the course of my trip.
Versailles was pretty, and I was excited to get in free due to my status as a long-term E.U. resident, but there really isn't much to say about it. It's one of those places that seems amazing until you begin to look at it historically and realize that it's basically a temple to unfairly allocated wealth and an abusive class system. While it may be true that having all-silver tables and chairs is nice, I'd honestly rather see no Versailles and a smaller slum: less people eating off plates of gold and more people eating. It did have some nice art though.
When I got to Paris, I was feeling burnt out, and got a nice youth hostel for a few days. While I planned to continue using my bike as a partial means of transportation, I made a hesitant decision and announced the end of my biking trip to my friends and family on Facebook. From here on out I thought it would be trains for long distances and bikes for short ones. I went to sleep, woke up, and as I rode to the Louvre a delivery truck made sure I kept my word about the end of my trip, although with much more finality. Finally my inertia was truly broken, and as an object that had been gaining in velocity for quite some time, stopping me took quite the outside force.
It was on a one way street with a nice bike lane and a few alleyways protruding off to either side that it happened, and really a simple accident in retrospect. While I rode along, not paying much attention to the road and busy feeling shocked at how light my bike could feel unloaded, a delivery truck pulled out in front of me, and I didn't think much of it. It drove forward for a little bit, and suddenly, right when I was alongside it, began backing into an alleyway. No signal, no stopping, no warning. It was an instant collision, and while my reflexes allowed me to stay on my bike, I smashed my hand, gripping hard on my left brake, straight through his back-right tail light. I thought I was fine until I saw the blood, and even then was unsurprised by the amount: I'd hurt my fingers enough times to know they bleed a lot.
Then I turned around, decided to talk to the driver, and washed the blood off. My fingers were ripped wide open, and I could see the tendons in them working as I demonstrated that nothing was broken. I think I threw up a little in my mouth, but in my state of shock felt no pain: it was either that or nerve damage.
I apologized to the driver, who looked shocked, and asked where the hospital was. He would have called an ambulance but I told him it was probably too expensive, which in retrospect probably made him feel pretty bad. Even then I didn't really blame him, and thought how weird it was that in the U.S. I could probably have sued him for a lot of money, even as I walked almost 2 kilometers to the hospital while my hand sprayed blood everywhere.
I was shocked at how little anyone noticed (or at least how little anyone reacted), but I guess Seattle would be the same...Big cities are funny like that. Anyway, the nurses at the hospital were a little brief with me at first and I had a bad feeling about going through a foreign medical system with no knowledge of the french language. They proved me wrong in my worrying.
The nurses were only rough because they saw what I didn't: That I was losing a lot of blood and that I was likely going to faint if they didn't do something quickly. They also probably thought I hurt my hand by getting into a fight or something stupid until they called in someone who spoke english to ask me what happened.
A specialist made sure nothing major was damaged, and he happily announced that it was "only a flesh wound". I have no idea if the Monty Python reference was deliberate, but the nurses looked at me weird for laughing. I got 5 stitches and a brief lesson on what the interior of fingers looks like. I had to come in every 2 days or so to get it looked at.
Paris was the end of the line, for a while.
Anyway, I'm in Chamonix now, enjoying some time to heal up in the alps. It's a little like a combination of Glacier National Park and Middle Earth (LOTR in french?), and I hope I can stay here a little while longer before pushing onward to Granada. I have 12 more days, after all, before I can really settle down, and I'm honestly immensely excited to get to where I'm going and just stay there.
Too much inertia is a little scary in life, but sometimes an outside force is just what we all need to remind us to slow down a little and enjoy the smaller things. To remember that no matter how independent we CAN be or how long we CAN ride in one day, that the thing that makes it worthwhile is always the people we meet and the places we go that make travelling worthwhile. It's a lesson I hope I never forget.
NOTE: I also have either food poisoning or the flu, so maybe there's another reason home sounds so appealing to me right now. Camping in the mountains, with temperatures ranging from 33 to -5 celsius isn't all that much fun when you are alternating between a fever and chills.
SECOND NOTE: I am also proud to say that I just finished reading Moby Dick, a whale of a book and, while not my favorite, an accomplishment just as challenging as riding my bike 5,000 kilometers.
THIRD NOTE: I'm sorry for how long this post was, and for how infrequent these are, but I've been camping almost every night and the internet was expensive to use in Paris.
FINAL NOTE: From here, I will likely go to Les Deux Alpes, a summer skiing resort outside of Grenoble, then Marseille via train, then to Barcelona, from there taking a bus to Granada. Because of the damage I did to my hand biking hasn't been comfortable for a while, nor is biking with the flu a very plausible endeavor.
Ever since I left Amsterdam I'd been feeling my trip carrying itself a little out of control. Two months on the road are a long time, and the constant go-go-go pace I was living at had finally begun to get to me as I continued pushing further and further...and still, I couldn't stop.
After leaving the city of Amsterdam I (with some difficulty, because I had in no way researched a route) navigated my way down to the Hook of Holland (literally the Corner of Holland, this place is a major 90 degree bend in the Dutch coastline as well as a major ferry port). After a night camping in the woods, not even worried about being found, I bought some nectarines and other appropriate travel foods and got on a ship bound for Harwich, England.
On the boat ride, I listened to The Beatles, The Who, and every other British Invasion artist whose name shows up in my debilitatingly small iTunes library. I was glad to be excited to go somewhere; not just a name on a map to say I had visited it but a place and a culture which had drawn my interest for so long my anticipation proved enough to fill even a 6 hour ferry ride.
Beowulf.
Chaucer.
Shakespeare.
Manley-Hopkins.
Phillip Pullman.
Rock and Roll.
The Clash.
Doctor Who.
Sherlock Holmes.
Douglas Adams.
Oxford.
Harry Potter.
THE ACCENTS.
I was pretty excited to be in a place where I spoke the language, as well.
When I got off the boat I was promptly greeted by some of the greatest accents I have ever encountered, requesting the customs form I had neglected to fill out. Pushed to the side, I began a brief yet fateful conversation with a couple of people travelling on a tandem bike named Raphael (henceforth Raph) and Ariel; a frenchman and a New Yorker (now living together in Paris) who were likewise riding to London.
It didn't take long for us to decide we would ride together.
That night we rode into town, changed some money, bought some food, lost the bike route almost instantly, and began riding in more or less the direction of London. We stopped and camped right off the side of the road in a little stand of trees near a soccer field, having a little cookout on a campfire and talking about all sorts of ridiculous things. True, I was the literal third wheel on a bike trip (a very 2-wheeled sort of affair), but it was nice to be with people, and the feelings of moderate insanity I'd been feeling began to ebb.
The next morning we departed for London, realizing promptly we really had no idea how to get there and further that there was no such thing as a well signposted bike route from Harwich to Colchester to Chelmsford to London. While we didn't know exactly how we were going to get there, I did come by one piece of particularly good luck: A public book exchange in a distinctly british red phone booth in the middle of nowhere. I traded some Vonnegut (thanks Ed) for some Sherlock Holmes (thematically appropriate) and we went on our way. It was good that I found something to make this day worthwhile, because as it turns out, we weren't going to make it to London.
We got lost. A lot. We argued (I tried to remain a neutral party). We asked for a lot of directions.
We resigned ourselves to our fate and decided to camp out near Brentwood, a little ways out of the London metropolitan area that sprawls forever outward and home to Ye Olde Green Dragon Pub.
Now, I didn't want to tell my friends this, but I had only insisted we try the Green Dragon because I figured any place whose very name was a thinly veiled reference to the finest bar in the Shire (Lord of the Rings, for those readers who might not get the reference) had to be a pretty good place to be. I was right.
While the opening ceremonies could never have compared to Beijing, it was the quipping humor of the bar-inhabitants who made this experience truly worthwhile. They did indeed make several Tolkien references that I picked up on, and besides the fact that the food was pointedly mediocre relative to the price, the whole affair was quite worthwhile. When we finally had to go it was very late, and our fellows were probably a little concerned for our wellfare...still, they bid us a fine farewell, all together, and we slept in a park nearby almost immediately.
London was certainly excited for the Olympics. Innumerable people flooding the streets, the famous rings everywhere, special Olympic-traffic-only lanes on the roadways...it was just pure energy and noise and fanfare. I was glad to have a couch to sleep on in this massive city, as it may honestly be said that there is no way to see London in a day. As the three days I did spend there have sufficiently blurred, I will instead offer some vignettes of my stay: The Tate Modern, Shakespeare's Globe (Richard the III), Sunny weather, Free Festivals, Bricklane Market, street performers, Wade Meade/Jeannin, dutch brass bands, swing dancing in the streets, Platform 9 and 3/4, Bagels, Big Ben, The London Eye, and meeting the man who rode 90,000 miles in a rickshaw to see the Olympics: Chen Guanming.
A 57 year old Chinese farmer, Chen Guanming either looks much older or much younger than his age betrays. While this short, wizened, and bearded man seems to have lived a hard life, he is youthful, strong, and immensely happy. To give you some background, he was given the privilege of seeing the closing ceremonies to the Beijing Olympics due to his immense feats of garbage collection surrounding the stadium. It says a lot about a man to get famous for picking up litter, but his awesomeness continues. Apparently, he was so incredibly moved by the ceremony that he decided he would do whatever it took to make it to London 2012, and so soon began riding his formidable 3-wheeled rickshaw to Europe, doing whatever it took to make it in time for the games.
It has been hard to get an accurate accounting of his precise route, but as I understand it he crossed the Himalayas 3 times, rode his bike across Iraq, and took some massive detours en route, battling floods, typhoons, visa problems, and wars.
Leaving London was hard, as was saying goodbye to Wade, Jeannin, Raph, and Ariel, but again my inertia was carrying me forward: I couldn't convince myself to slow down and decided to push on for Paris, albiet indirectly.
From Paddington Station I got a train to Oxford, hoping to avoid some of the insane traffic and mediocre roadways that go between the two, and was glad I did. After exploring the town for some time, realizing that I'd probably be a much more motivated student if I went to Oxford, visiting a ton of bookshops (including Blackwells, the preferred bookshop of J.R.R. Tolkien himself, who had apparently run up a massive debt he may or may not have ever repaid them), failing to see Richard Dawkins or anyone particularly famous, and eating an entire tub of Ben and Jerry's in front of a rather incredulous british child, I began my ride to Bath via the Cotswalds.
England has the topography of a rumpled sheet after a restless night. The hills may not be very long or particularly frequent, but many of the climbs are impossibly steep, and so I spent rather a lot of this day pushing my bike up 20 degree inclines that my worn out gears could not possibly conquer.
There are also a lot of cows, castles, and cottages.
Bath was cool, but not as awesome as the culture of thin-canal-dwellers that existed just outside of it. These people, whose lives are condensed into 2 meter wide, entirely customized river boats are really awesome. From the brightly painted to totally camoflauged to Lord of the Rings themed boats, these people lived in a world all their own, and after riding along the canal-tow-path for about 15 kilometers, I wouldn't have minded giving it a shot. They seemed to barter for a lot of their needs, most boats offering some sort of useful service with a little sign. They had solar panels and gardens and bikes. They had cozy little homes and friendly neighbors.
After leaving the Canal, I rode somewhat indirectly to Stonehenge, then pushed south towards Poole, where I expected to get a ferry to Cherbourg, France.
After some lovely riding in the New Forest, I got to Poole, only to find that I needed to ride 100k to get my ferry the next day, and it was around there my nerves started fraying.
I was losing it.
I rode as far as I could, but eventually had to take a train to get to Portsmouth in time.
While the terrain was lovely, much of it being sunny seaside resorts or deep forests, I didn't appreciate it much at the time: I hadn't been appreciating a whole lot for quite a while, really. While it was hard to see at the time, I think in retrospect it was clear I had become destination-focused (thinking I wanted to make it to a lot of famous places) instead of process-oriented in the course of the last few weeks, and I think it was this that began my downward spiral. In any case, one cannot ride in a destination oriented way for too long before feeling like a train would be more appropriate.
Biking was never much about the destination, and it's easy to forget that.
I was homesick and lonely, wishing for the faculties of community and family and friends and just wishing to do the sorts of everyday things that make life so great at home: Rock climbing with friends, night hikes, skateboarding, snowboarding, concerts, and just being with people one cares about. I love bikes, but 2 months is a lot of riding to do without taking a break, and I had overestimated myself. Admitting that was hard.
I pushed hard and I decided to make it to Paris before making a decision on what I was to do, but I think even then I had realized that I was no longer getting what I wanted out of my great European Odyssey. I was being pushed onward by my desire to go, but what I was chasing was something intangible; something one only finds by staying in one place for a while.
I rode from Caen to Versailles in one and a half days, one of which pushed my cyclocomputer 200k closer to the 5,000 kilometer mark I still hope to reach in the course of my trip.
Versailles was pretty, and I was excited to get in free due to my status as a long-term E.U. resident, but there really isn't much to say about it. It's one of those places that seems amazing until you begin to look at it historically and realize that it's basically a temple to unfairly allocated wealth and an abusive class system. While it may be true that having all-silver tables and chairs is nice, I'd honestly rather see no Versailles and a smaller slum: less people eating off plates of gold and more people eating. It did have some nice art though.
When I got to Paris, I was feeling burnt out, and got a nice youth hostel for a few days. While I planned to continue using my bike as a partial means of transportation, I made a hesitant decision and announced the end of my biking trip to my friends and family on Facebook. From here on out I thought it would be trains for long distances and bikes for short ones. I went to sleep, woke up, and as I rode to the Louvre a delivery truck made sure I kept my word about the end of my trip, although with much more finality. Finally my inertia was truly broken, and as an object that had been gaining in velocity for quite some time, stopping me took quite the outside force.
It was on a one way street with a nice bike lane and a few alleyways protruding off to either side that it happened, and really a simple accident in retrospect. While I rode along, not paying much attention to the road and busy feeling shocked at how light my bike could feel unloaded, a delivery truck pulled out in front of me, and I didn't think much of it. It drove forward for a little bit, and suddenly, right when I was alongside it, began backing into an alleyway. No signal, no stopping, no warning. It was an instant collision, and while my reflexes allowed me to stay on my bike, I smashed my hand, gripping hard on my left brake, straight through his back-right tail light. I thought I was fine until I saw the blood, and even then was unsurprised by the amount: I'd hurt my fingers enough times to know they bleed a lot.
Then I turned around, decided to talk to the driver, and washed the blood off. My fingers were ripped wide open, and I could see the tendons in them working as I demonstrated that nothing was broken. I think I threw up a little in my mouth, but in my state of shock felt no pain: it was either that or nerve damage.
I apologized to the driver, who looked shocked, and asked where the hospital was. He would have called an ambulance but I told him it was probably too expensive, which in retrospect probably made him feel pretty bad. Even then I didn't really blame him, and thought how weird it was that in the U.S. I could probably have sued him for a lot of money, even as I walked almost 2 kilometers to the hospital while my hand sprayed blood everywhere.
I was shocked at how little anyone noticed (or at least how little anyone reacted), but I guess Seattle would be the same...Big cities are funny like that. Anyway, the nurses at the hospital were a little brief with me at first and I had a bad feeling about going through a foreign medical system with no knowledge of the french language. They proved me wrong in my worrying.
The nurses were only rough because they saw what I didn't: That I was losing a lot of blood and that I was likely going to faint if they didn't do something quickly. They also probably thought I hurt my hand by getting into a fight or something stupid until they called in someone who spoke english to ask me what happened.
A specialist made sure nothing major was damaged, and he happily announced that it was "only a flesh wound". I have no idea if the Monty Python reference was deliberate, but the nurses looked at me weird for laughing. I got 5 stitches and a brief lesson on what the interior of fingers looks like. I had to come in every 2 days or so to get it looked at.
Paris was the end of the line, for a while.
Anyway, I'm in Chamonix now, enjoying some time to heal up in the alps. It's a little like a combination of Glacier National Park and Middle Earth (LOTR in french?), and I hope I can stay here a little while longer before pushing onward to Granada. I have 12 more days, after all, before I can really settle down, and I'm honestly immensely excited to get to where I'm going and just stay there.
Too much inertia is a little scary in life, but sometimes an outside force is just what we all need to remind us to slow down a little and enjoy the smaller things. To remember that no matter how independent we CAN be or how long we CAN ride in one day, that the thing that makes it worthwhile is always the people we meet and the places we go that make travelling worthwhile. It's a lesson I hope I never forget.
NOTE: I also have either food poisoning or the flu, so maybe there's another reason home sounds so appealing to me right now. Camping in the mountains, with temperatures ranging from 33 to -5 celsius isn't all that much fun when you are alternating between a fever and chills.
SECOND NOTE: I am also proud to say that I just finished reading Moby Dick, a whale of a book and, while not my favorite, an accomplishment just as challenging as riding my bike 5,000 kilometers.
THIRD NOTE: I'm sorry for how long this post was, and for how infrequent these are, but I've been camping almost every night and the internet was expensive to use in Paris.
FINAL NOTE: From here, I will likely go to Les Deux Alpes, a summer skiing resort outside of Grenoble, then Marseille via train, then to Barcelona, from there taking a bus to Granada. Because of the damage I did to my hand biking hasn't been comfortable for a while, nor is biking with the flu a very plausible endeavor.
