Day #42 – The End

This is the end, we are done, but still it doesn’t feel like such a success as I expected. We don’t arrive happy and enthusiastic, we arrive broken and exhausted. After Waldburg (Austria) we had 3 more biking days to go, yet we have no pictures and no memories. Daniel was unconscious on the handle bar. I heard the pedals moving but I couldn’t feel them. I couldn’t feel the wind, didn’t see no landscape. I don’t know how Czech Republic looks like, I only saw the monotonous white line at the edge of the road. It was better that way. Ahead was only desperation. We do have a picture of that, of how desperation looks like… a long unendless road that looks flat but always climbs and becomes steeper at the horizon.

Daniel fell asleep on the bike and we missed a curve. The road turned but we didn’t. The front wheel hit the sharp curb and we crashed and rolled on the sidewalk… at least that was the only real laugh we had on the bike. The MP3 player was an escape, a distraction… but it ran out of battery 4h before arriving in Brno (Czech). A couple of seconds after the MP3 player turned off I started hearing music again… new music, a sort of sweet and simple electronic music that I hadn’t heard before. There was nothing around us, only empty wheat fields. I took the headphones off to be sure, the music was still there. I swear I could here it cristal clear. The wind blowed sometimes hard and sometimes soft, producing loud or soft noise, but the music remained undisturbed, always with the same volume. It was scary, but soothing. I am not making this up.

We are in Teplá, Slovakia, where we promised we would be. But it feels more like defeat than success. We were defeated 4 days ago. We just kept biking out of inertia. It was a great ride, lots of fun, lots of places, and lots of experiences, but too long in the end.

Thanks

We would like to give special thanks to all our hosts who gave us a place to stay and took care of us. It was a vital part of the journey. Without them we would have gotten sick of camping and loneliness, and probably wouldn’t have made it. We are very thankful and hope we can someday return the favor.

We also thank you all, for reading and commenting our blog. Specially to those who wrote comments supporting us along the way. It meant a lot to us and gave us a huge motivation. I hope it was fun to read about our little trip.

Stats

Day #35 – #38: Rest (Passau)
Day #39: 96km – 4:45h (Waldburg)
Day #40: 106km – 5:25h (Dobersberg)
Day #41: 125km – 5:50h (Brno)
Day #42: 143km – 6:40h (Teplá)

Grand total: 2712km – 141:53h
Average 19.11 km/h
7 countries: Spain, France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia.
Mountain ranges: los Pirineos, le Massif Central, die Alpen, Karpaty.

Challenges page updated!