To Bike or Not to Bike?

That’s not really a question. 

After our bikes were stolen, Will and I were in a bit of a quandary:  What do we do next?  We decided to buy packs and hike/walk/train/bus/whatever-it-took to get us across the continent. 

Now, we both agree that we probably should have just bought cheap bikes and kept on riding.  But, with the wounds the theft caused still fresh, buying a new bike felt like replacing a dead relative. 

What we didn’t realize at the time was how much our identities were tied to our bicycles.  We loved being bicycle tourists.  We loved that it set us apart from the hoards of backpackers who were limited to trains and buses; who stayed in cities and slept in hostels and almost never actually met “the people.”  As terrible as it sounds, we loved the fact that our bikes clearly, and from a long way off, marked us as different.  We loved that our bikes gave us the freedom to leave a place we didn’t like, to keep searching for a better camping spot, to get out of town and into the countryside and away.  We loved that we saw the county and not the city, met the people who didn’t speak English and hadn’t seen an American in who knew how long. 

I’ll admit that bikes also made some things more complicated.  I’ll be very happy if I never get shaken down for a bribe by another train conductor.  Trains and traveling with bikes, but not by bike, was a bigger pain in the ass than I ever imagined.  More than once I promised myself that, on my next bike tour, it will be solely by bike—just to avoid the hassle and cost of transporting the thing.  But, by and large, I still think traveling by bicycle is the best way to travel.

After the bikes were stolen, we had to come to grips with the fact that we were no longer bicycle tourists.  Our adventure was over; from here on out, we were just travelers—backpackers, even.  After weeks of seeing ourselves as better than them, we were them. 

We could no longer escape the towns.  While we probably could have gotten away with bandit camping (just camping anywhere out of sight) despite being in the European Union, we were no longer able to get far enough out of town to feel comfortable doing so.  We were weighed down by forty pounds of pack, which kept us chained to the towns, cities, and trains that we most wanted to avoid.

Once we came to grips with the fact that our identities had been stolen along with our bikes, we were able to work on a new way of seeing ourselves.  We ended up having a good time.  We ended up seeing amazing places and meeting amazing people that we would not have seen or met by bicycle.  We ended up learning more about traveling in Europe and deciphering train codes and freeway signs and languages that, by bicycle, we didn’t need to know.  We ended up swimming in seas and lakes, hiking in mountains, and riding through countrysides we would never have seen because we would not have been there in the first place.  There were even a couple of times where, seeing a biker work his way up a mountain in the rain, or maneuvering through insane traffic, we would realize that we were happy not to be in the same situation.

But.  We would often say, “This road would be so fun to ride down.”  Meeting bicycle tourists at campgrounds, it was painful—physically painful—to hear them talk about routes; to watch them pack up and head out in the morning.  When we saw a bike tourist, we both would follow them with our eyes until they were out of sight, longing clearly visible in both of us.  The most common phrases we said in the second part of the trip, as sad as it is? “I miss the bikes” and “I wish we had the bikes.”

The trip was not the trip that we wanted.  But it was the trip that we got.  Half of me wishes the bikes were not stolen—both because it made what was supposed to be a bad-ass bike trip into a… well, just a trip, and because having something taken like that just hurts.  But the other half of me knows that the trip we had was worth it.  The trip we had taught us things that the trip we wanted would not have.  Maybe the most important lesson in that is your trip is what you make it… no matter what happens to you, it’s all in how you react.  I don’t think we were wrong to be sad, or confused, or lost, after the bikes were taken.  I think we managed to make do with what was handed to us, salvage what we could, and still have an amazing time… albeit with moments of (sometimes extreme) sadding. 

We did what we could.  We enjoyed what we could.  We learned what we could, and as much as possible we tried to laugh when we knew it was all we could do.