We made it!!

We thought it would be 800Km, it was 1035...
We thought it would be flat all the way... it was hilly!
We thought it would be sunny... it was mostly rainy!
We thought it would be fun... actualy it WAS :D

A special place

This place became special for one reason: This is where we crossed the 1000Km mark!

The Mont Saint Michel

Arriving to Mont Saint Michel delivered us an amazing set of emotions. It was one of the last locations we had planned to visit, it was merely half day away from our final destination, and it is an absolute magical place. Around one kilometer into the sea, emerges a city with an outstanding cathedral dominating the peaks of the island. We had seen it before in pictures, but to see its silhouette many kilometers away just sparkled a rush of adrenaline into our brains and legs. We simply could not stop until we finally reached it and left absorbed by its magic. The empty natural surroundings further enhance this feeling and approaching the rocky wall structures and passing through them to the inside was a unique majestic feeling.

Camping

 

Camping sites expose people. While hotels have the ability to abstract the person to what the person wants to show when outside the room, this is virtually impossibe in a camping site. During this trip we had the opportunity to say in quite some campings and observe a lot of different people. Provided a piece of land to stay, we saw people with only a simple roof above their heads for sleeping, all the way to the ones who literally brought a full house with them. The later was really obvious when a family parked next to us on a TIR truck converted to a mobile home. The mobile home was just like a full house, except for the wheels which gave it the ability to change its location. We wondered about the purposes of this kind of traveling. It allowed the individuals to stay in their absolute comfort zone while in a very careful and controlled manner peaking out to the region and people to where they moved the house. A full dependency on the everyday life comforts while still going to some other place. A way to protect their privacy and not expose themselves so much to the surroundings is what we guessed they were looking for. Traveling can be an amazing way to meet and feel different local cultures and it requires the surrendering of some of our comforts. These can be changes of location, habits, language, family, sleeping bed, cooking, reading... all things we incorporated into our daily routine and defined as established. It's up to each one of us to find the compromise of how much we want to feels and how much we are willing to expose.

Daring to be different

This brave flower dared to be different. It grew where it was not supposed to grow, away from the protection of its natural habitat and companion plants. As its unique beauty radiating from its hostile surroundings inspired us, we share this picture here for you!

Windows of Caen

We saw these two windows in one of the streets of the Caen city. This triggered some thoughts, first over the reasons of just creating a wall in place of a window, and over the two choices if those rooms belong to two separate rooms. One, the one with the bars giving you visual access to the outside world, and the second one, completely isolating you from the outside world. Which room do you think would make someone happier, providing that someone spends all its life in it? Both confine one to a limited space, and one of them does not present any more than what it actually is, a nice room, while the other gives you the exact same thing, with a glimpse of what life could be (but is not for you, with the bars stopping you from reaching it).

Vire

Vire, a hard to reach city once again away from the coast. A 94 Km day which left us absolutely knocked out, but closer to our destination. If no surprises happen, by the end of the day today we should reach Mont Saint Michel!

Crossing of the Tancarville bridge

The Tancarville bridge, which was a day goal in itself, although without any expectations on its surroundings. We expected just an empty perhaps industrial area due to the proximity to the city of Havre, but this couldn't be further from the truth. We found a unique beauty in the surroundings and found ourselves in a natural reserve area after the crossing of the bridge. Surprises happen, and we spent the night in an amazing house with the sweetest couple who hosted us and tried together with us to communicate in French. A lesson learned the next morning is to always carry cash as the closest ATM might be 15Kms away! And so we created the first 30Km difference between our two cycling Kilometer counters :)

Good morning Normandy

The arrival to Normandy was a delight. After cycling through peaceful countrysides and coastlines, we were amazed to see the powerful cliffs separating the land from the sea

The sound of the Normand sea

The small waves crashing into the Normand land, do it on stony beaches, shouting loud their presence. This unique sound, feels like the big brother of the sound one can hear on sandy beaches when lying really close to the shore. The water bubbling into the empty space between the stones and out of them, while the stones crash into each other re-arranging themselves, generates a loud sound that one can hear really far away. At night, this sea sound amplifies further into us, making sure we fall asleep into this rhythm.

A few days without Internet

Even though our real road progress has been really good, full of new adventures, the cyber world has not been available in the nature. We are currently making a break to recover from an ankle strain, and will update some of the great adventures we had in the last days!

Day 6 - Back to the coast

The rain hit us again, and we landed in a nice city: Berck-sur-mer! We decided to stay here for one more day for a deserved rest :)

The Seeder

Traveling the whole day through fields makes one realize the scale of food production. If one imagines how much food is produced, its absolutely massive. Probably in a society based on growth where everything needs to continuously increase, arguments need to be found on how to increase this. It becomes hard to imagine that with such huge abundance, shortages of food exist. It becomes strange to think about what kind of food is produced in those fields, one would imagine to find as much variety as the variety we buy, but somehow we see a great part of it in a monotonic, mono-culture way, where huge machinery wraps it in large plastic bags. This is unfortunately not for human consumption. At least not directly. This feeds animals which in turn are consumed in part by humans. The ratio of food produced in those fields and the one consumed after eating the animal, is a couple of dozens. So for every 30-50Kgs of food produced in the field, only 1Kg results for direct human consumption. Not to mention the space required to keep the animals. It's shocking how we managed the available abundance to just put more business layers into it, completely de-educating the society on how to live without consuming meat. Seeing and understanding this, truly motivates us towards inverting it!

Day 5 - Stepping in the interior

Today we left the coast trying to escape from the wind hoping to find beautiful sunny and flat countrysides. We did it all - except the last one! The flat dream fell apart to find continuous uphills and downhills revealing amazing sceneries, far apart localities, separated by amazing fields and forests which we crossed. These roads really seem to have been made for the French cars like the Citroen 2CV. We have no clue what the designer of this car had in mind, but surely these sceneries were a part of it!

The long and winding road

Our friend the wind

We established a love-hate relationship with the wind. It seems to love us and it looks like it means it. We tried to ignore it, scream at it, and still, it keeps on insisting. We understand it is not easy to be lonely, misunderstood and on top of that ignored, but we hate its advances. It tried from the front, left and right and it always insists on showing itself. We hope that it understands we are not really interested and that it gives up. Or perhaps we need to accept it and hope it then goes along with us, in the same direction as we are heading!

A song someone once dedicated to it:

That makes three of us!

Our bike surrounding one very proud colourful bike

Weer een auto minder - Again one less car! - That makes three of us :)

Borders

Crossing an (EU) border by bike allows one to still find the old tired buildings which used to control the flow of people from one country to another. Usually heavily controlled by people whose duty was simply control it without questioning, believing they were acting for a higher good. Patriotic feelings towards an abstract entity like a country, make people aparently unite towards it, while individualy separating them from all the others. Belonging to a group does not make us better people by any standards, unlike most groups like to claim. Can't we just forget the concepts of separation by country, race, gender or religion and act like who we actually are: Humans?

Day 4 - The crossing to France

Following a rainy day we were confronted with a beautiful morning whose sunrise we missed due to oversleeping in a charming coastal city in the Belgian coast. We headed straight in the direction of France to find yet a new reality. The amazing and dedicated bike lanes turned into a mix of side lanes on highways and cycling through regular traffic.

Changes

A new day - it's incredible all the changes that can happen overnight and how they change the perception of what we see and feel. Things don't change, just the way we interpret or personify them does, making them look as if they have changed. It's probably very similar to how we relate and perceive other people. If we change ourselves, it might feel that they have also changed. With the key difference that they might actually change with our change!

 In a nutshell, Gandhi said it all: Be the change you want to see in the world.

Heavy delicacy

How massive heaviness is nothing more than a composition of delicate bits.

The navigation system

Following an ongoing adventure with the phonehouse selling me a waterproof phone which broke from water damage, I came back to my nokia n900 as a navigation system. Probably the best and last HW/SW combination developed by nokia, it's packed with features which make it a great device to take on the bike. Although the OS was discontinued, still a significant quantity of support groups exist for it, and its absolutely amazing how one person works can make such great software. For the Navigation, we chose to use the Mapero, a mapping/navigation application allowing both on-line and off-line navigation - perfect for taking abroad. To save precious battery life, it allows setting the gps pooling time. So once every 120 seconds turns out to be more than enough to keep the log of our route and see where we are heading!

Pedal on!

Pedaling cross the Belgian coast-line

Day 3 - The Belgian coast-line

A long bike lane following the beach, this is how the border of Belgium was introduced to us. We left the Netherlands for the next weeks, and we will for sure miss it! Whatever thoughts crossed our minds about the wind in Zeeland, The Belgian coast-line made us realize that we underestimated anything we could have expected. Clear continuous signs showing kite/wind-surfing areas should have been a clear indication that this area is a wind-surfers paradise, rather than a east-west cycles. Head wind and rain, it was a fight against the elements day!

Day 2 - Zeeland

Zeeland, or sea land, a hostile natural environment where shallow vegetation mixes itself with a resting sea. And this feels that if our vision was perfect we could see this environment forever. The only element reminding us the non-sterility of this environment is a strong continuous wind whistling on every sharp surface it finds on its way. So much different from Brabants, where, such a contrast within a distance we learned with everyday life to neglect. The hurry of life makes us miss so many wonderful things surrounding us.

Day 1

Brabants, a concentration of green life, large fields intercalated with small forests, feels like a paradise for cycling. The roads and bike lanes surrounded by trees create beautiful scenarios to pedal ahead.

Leaving home

Leaving home for the next 3 weeks. It's been a while since we took such a long break from the chosen daily life. Mixed feelings of excitement and nervousness flood our minds, knowing one thing for sure: It will be a great adventure!

An invited passenger

Hope he enjoys the ride as much as we!

Bags are packed

It became a challenge to figure out what is it that we absolutely need to take with us during the next 3 weeks. A compromise between just in case comfort, safe daily comfort and luxury. Most of the luxury stayed at home. Next morning, is the morning to go.

Hope both Cayuca and Cosmo (our bikes) have a good rest as they have some Km's ahead of them!

The Beginning

Once again, the beginning of a new blog!

What are a couple of weeks per year, called vacations good for? It definitely gives us the opportunity to experience a different life than the one we have during the rest of the year, showing us how great our regular life actually is :) Many people I guess would state it the other way around.

With this blog, we intend to keep updated, our family and friends interested in our cycling vacations experience, which certainly will be very different from our daily lives. Two bikes, six bags and the two of us. That's it for three weeks! We will for sure keep ourselves who we are, but in a different context, helping us perhaps to realize what is really important in our everyday live. All this, during an awesome adventure.


For those of you who wish to follow us, a very warm welcome in this efemorous blog!