Hello friends,
As I write this I’m sitting in the common area of a backpackers hostel in Dresden, drinking coffee and planning my attack on the breakfast buffet. It’s pretty quiet at the moment, partly because it’s still low-season; partly because the few people who are here probably stayed out late last night. I’ve felt extremely comfortable ever since I arrived, two days ago, shivering with exhaustion and with the icy wind that had been blowing down the Elbe gorge as I rode up it.
I got lucky with this hostel. I chose it, as I do most accommodation these days, after carefully scrutinising its online listing to find out whether they’d have somewhere safe to keep my bike. My original Canyon Grizl was stolen from a hotel in Koblenz in summer 2022, and ever since then I’ve been anxious if I can’t be sure that it’ll be safe when I leave it overnight.1
But when I arrived, a pleasant young Finnish man greeted me in perfect German, then switched to perfect English, and escorted me into the courtyard of the building, where the bike would be kept in a locked shed to which only staff had access. Then I was given a key to the six-bed dorm that I would have to myself for two of the next three nights, and found my way to the wash room, where I warmed my cold skin up under a high-pressure shower that was as hot as I cared to make it. And after I’d dragged my starving self down the street and managed to make a decision about what to have for dinner (Vietnamese – it’s the best contrast to my on-bike diet, which these days consists mostly of bread and cheese), I curled up in a corner of the common room with my knitting, drank an alcohol-free beer, and people-watched for the remainder of the evening.
I am, I realise, back in travel mode – a way of life I have inhabited for long periods of my history, and which is so familiar that it exists mostly at a subconscious level. I couldn’t even have recognised it without having gone away and come back to it, as I did for a couple of years during the initial COVID crisis, and as I have over the past year or so, because my reduced health has meant I couldn’t go off on a long bike trip, as I normally like to at least once or twice a year.
Back in March 2022, following a shoot for Rapha in Lanzarote, I set off on my first solo foreign bike trip since the disruptions of the pandemic. My life had looked very different indeed for the last couple of years (I had been working in a care home, studying biology in my spare time, and positively vibrating with the stress of it all), and as the ferry docked in Gran Canaria, and I rolled off into the lashing rain, I recognised a part of myself I hadn’t seen for a very long time. It’s not that I become a different person when I travel – more as if all of the quirks of my personality, the things I observe, and the way I move through the world, are being filmed through a different lens. The feel and the flavour are different. There are of course all sorts of practicalities that wouldn’t exist in my at-home life, but there is also a far more elusive difference; an aesthetic variation that I can still only partially identify.
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