Travel #1 – How do you even begin a big journey?

It turns out that 1 week of your life, as short as that may be, can change the way you feel and interact with your life, for years to come.

Hey, I’m Bastiano and welcome to new my blog describing my multiple travels and a vagabond life that I live – living in multiple European cities.

The special, life changing week I’m going to talk about here, is my first journey. It started with our decision to go 1000 km by bicycles.
Even though it took only a week to finish this journey – and how long does a "week" sound like? – it changed our thinking about how to live, how to spend our time, and about what’s possible or not.

But let's start from the beginning. How it even happened.

Did it ever happen to you that you hadn’t had occupation for slightly too long and you were going crazy about doing something with yourself?

It could be the time you searched for a new job, or you were on a very long sick leave from work or school, or you just couldn’t handle the amount of holidays you took from work, and you started to yearn even for coming back to your office?
If you’re like 90% of people, you probably felt that way at some point in your life. And this is exactly us in this story that I’m about to tell. We didn’t know how to pass our holidays and we wanted to impress ourselves by doing something we have never done before and that very few people would do. Going on a journey.

We found 1000km to be a reasonable distance for an about one week-long “trip”, but as it turned out, 7 days - little as they are - can bring you more beautiful memories and life lessons than it may seem when when you in a time when all of your weeks are very similar.
Stable, repetitive, urban life, really makes us underestimate the length of "just" a few days.

Preparation phase

Let’s think about it. What do you need to know before doing something like this?

Assume you are like us - you have (literally) no money, so you need to improvise. That’s not a good news, but at least it is some piece of knowledge for you.

You know you will be sleeping. Somewhere. (sure, who doesn’t) So the only way you can do it without money is to take (or borrow) a tent. (just as a side note: later in my journeys I discovered many more free ways of sleeping, which I will describe in future posts)

Transportation - travelling by bus or train surely does cost something. So the only free ways are hitchhiking or bicycles. Considering we are 3 young, healthy - and what’s worse - not even super handsome, guys, our chances of successful hitchhiking are quite low.
But isn’t proving physical strength to others one of the things that young guys like to do? And what gives a better chance to do that than crossing the entire country. After all – who goes 1000km on a bike?

In your first journey, packing will probably not turn out to be your talent.
The picture above shows how our result of preparations looked like. An old bicycle. A constantly falling down mattress laying on the completely non-water proof bags, a tent divided between the three of us, a few clothes, hygiene stuff, and… pieces of the map, printed out a few hours before, before we went to sleep (at the time of this story, smartphones or mobile access to the Internet and GPS weren’t a thing).
What can go wrong if you’re prepared like that? Well…

Last step - let’s plan the route. 1000 km sounds like a cool number - and you want to be cool :) How many kilometers a day should you go? In our case this problem was solved by the geography – the density of of big urban areas. Long story short - 150 km a day it was… (imagine, it sounded like a good idea)

So… looks like we have figured out everything. Right?Let’s start the journey tomorrow.
I hope you will be there.