No Direction Home : Bike-packing in the Balkans
In 2020, we crossed part of the Alps and the Vercors. Last year, we crossed through the Pyrenees and bathed in the Atlantic Ocean 12 days later. Bike-packing adventures have become a summer tradition it seems, and this year Audrey wanted something beyond France.
She dreams of the Balkans that she had glimpsed after too short an incursion in the past. The Balkans for me are a mixture of Tintin in King Ottokar's Sceptre and the first pages of The Use of the World by Nicolas Herdsman. (I need these small touches of symbolism to frame the journey in my head.)
We will leave from Kalamata in Greece, where I’ve made some of my deepest dives and which offered me the world champion title 11 years ago. Looking at our route on the map, which heads northwest into Albania and across to Italy via ferry, I find myself imagining we will ride all the way home to Nice.
But we only have four weeks of this scorching summer with fully loaded bikes to live the itinerant life. Audrey is more realistic: ‘we will go as far as we can.’