I miss my bicycle. It’s been 20 days since we sent them home, just shy of 3 weeks. If I remember correctly this is the longest I have gone without riding since I really started to ride regularly, almost 6 years ago. I’m really ready to be back on my bike, not carrying all my possessions with me and trying to get back in shape for some racing this fall. I’ve missed this type of riding since we left and am excited to be back at it in a few more weeks (but 6 whole weeks of no riding! AGH! I’m not sure how I will survive) I think it’s also a sign of being almost ready to be home. We’ve been away a long time and, although I am still excited for the remaining weeks of the trip, I think we are both ready to be home soon. It’s a strange feeling to have. Both excitement for what remains and excitement for it to be done. I’m almost ready to go back to routine: to have my own room that is always there, a kitchen, a roof over my head that is constant. Returning home will be so different from the past few months, yet so familiar. I’ve been rather surprised at how long it has taken to get to this point. Before leaving on this trip I had never been away from home for more than three weeks, and now 4 months later I am just starting to be ready to head home. When we left I figured that at some point I would run into homesickness, but honestly at this point I am not sure that I will. I’m ready to be home when the time comes but I don’t think I will get to the point of thinking I want to be home until we are at the end of the trip. We’ve kept busy, seen amazing things and met so many great people that I haven’t had much opportunity to miss home. I can barely believe we have already been gone for 130 days, it feels like only a little while ago that we were in Turkey wondering why on earth we had decided to do this.

Every part of the trip has been incredible. Sure there have been some low points and times that were really tough but I don’t think there is much I would change. After the first few days we found ourselves thinking “why did we start in Istanbul, that was a terrible idea.” but now I think that was one of the best choices we made on the trip. Without starting in Turkey we wouldn’t have seen some of the most amazing things on the trip and would have missed out on meeting so many great people. It was only by starting in Istanbul that we ended up riding through the Balkans, which were some of our favorite places of the whole trip. This trip has sparked so many new ideas for places to go and future trips that we may have never known about without going into this trip with so little preparation and so little idea of what we were doing.

Another unexpected product of the trip has been making us both excited for all that we can do when we get home. Being unable to work on the things we enjoy doing has been hard for sure, but it has renewed my passion for really working hard at them when I get home. I’m so excited to be able to come home and get back into the workshop and practice my welding and build more frames. And I can tell how excited Autumn is to be back in the studio making jewelry. It’s great to realize that i’m going to be so busy when I get home, working, learning, training, and racing and also know that I’m going to enjoy it that much more having taken a break for a while.