❓Why

After doing one of my first bikepacking trips (🏠 Home to Ljubljana 🇸🇮) I’ve just feel that was the moment to try to cycle between the place where I lived form the last years and where I was born. I set it up as an adventure for the next spring and waited for the warm enough weather to come.

The adventure scores in all the important aspects that drives me; social fitness, physical fitness and mental fitness.

👥 Social fitness

I’ve ridden this adventure together with Mathieu, so it was a nice experience to share. Initially Stefan wanted to ride together but the dates did not work and Laura and Yves wanted to join the first day, but starting on a week-day did not help.

It was good test to see how we survive 6 days in a row together with little time for ourselves, although when we were in main roads or drafting each other, we were one behind another.

Despite riding with Mathieu we met people along the way, from riders who joined us, waiters who felt curious about where we were coming or going, and the hosts of some airbnb who usually asked…; and where are the batteries of the bike 😏.

💪 Physical fitness

We spend long time on the bike day by day. In average about 12h per day, which challenged our asses🍑, our necks, our achilles tendons. However, we had very good feeding 🍽️  in the evenings and a good bed to sleep 🛏️ which helped to push hard day after day.

We had pleasant weather 🌤️, however when we arrived to Spain, we had to face a bit the heat.

🧠 Mental fitness

Doing the same for 6 days in a row and keeping focus on the road for 12h each day trains your brain to stay focus. Landscape is different every day, from mountainous Alps in Switzerland and France to the coast of France and Spain. We experienced different languages, food

This ride was as a preparation of Transbalkanrace 2022 🇸🇮🇭🇷🇧🇦🇲🇪 | DNF ❌️, we wanted to spend long hours on the bike, but still enjoy the good things of a bikepacking trip.

Summary

🏡to🏠 has been a blast 💨. 6 days to complete 1204 kms with a bit more of 6000m ⬆️.

The idea was in my mind for quite some time and was in my list for this year. I kept quite flexible since lately weather has been very unstable 🌧️🌨️🌪️ and finally choose the first window where the weather look good 🌤️. That has made it a bit difficult to allow more people to join 😔, either completely or partially. Indeed, Yves& Laura wanted to join the first kilometres and Stefan who travelled to Slovenia with me 2 years ago was very interested to do the whole trip. I can only say that there will be more 🙂.

Before we started our adventure, we had several route options 🔢, several ideas 💡in mind, but finally we opt for a quite conservative route. It is not the optimal route but we did not add extra mountains. However we cycle along the coast for quite a while which lead to detours, the small ups ↗️ and downs ↘️ and the crowded waterfronts.

The route has been built with Strava routes, usually directly from the phone just dropping 2 points and I’m happy of the amount of the high lights ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ we found along the way. Quite a lot of bike lanes, farmer road 🚜 , scenic roads 🤩 and anecdotes like

• ▶️ an elder woman asking for help to cross a bridge
• ▶️ a missing bridge which required a little boat to cross the river
• ▶️ bikepackers who waived ciao 👋
• ▶️ a waiter from Granada in a small town in the middle of France 🇫🇷
• ▶️ loosing a pair of flip flops 👡
• ▶️ going into restaurants in our light-weight sportive outfit which felt a bit like an outlier with other people 🤷‍♂️.

We started on Monday, April 11th with a late start around noon which allowed to do a better ramp up. We were quite early in the season, hence the number of cycling days we had this season can be most likely counted with one hand ✋. The next 3 days we did long days of 10h which allowed us to sum up rides of 200+ kms and cross quickly through France.

Our days were summarized as: wake up 🥱, eat 🥣, ride 🚴‍♂️, eat 🍕, ride 🚴‍♂️, coffee ☕, ride 🚴‍♂️, find a place to sleep 🛏️, eat 🍝, sleep 😴, repeat 🔁. Well, we managed to do some sightseeing of the places we were staying and we were passing by.

Somedays passed by since we finished 🏁 , the legs forgot about the effort, the mind about the down times ⬇️ and only highlights ⭐ ⭐ and type 2 fun 😄 is left. That’s what I think 💭 when I have a low time.

Time to think about new adventures 💭📝

Thank you all for your messages and kudos 🙇‍♂️ 🙏 🙇‍♂️