Time to find out more about our Glorious Heroes of Revolution.
Q: Why are you doing an Epic Journey?
Sid says it gives a sense of purpose to an otherwise empty life, ha ha. Seriously, it gives joy in the small-scale things, it’s a bit of a push back against the “10/100/1,000 Places you must see before you die” bucket-list consumerist school of travel. It pushes you onto your own resources in a very small sort of way. And it is a splendid feeling to think you’ve done a journey under your own steam which you can plot on a globe.
Q: Why on bicycles?
We like the speed of bicycle travel – it’s slow enough to see the countryside and fast enough to get places. We were originally toying with an idea like “walking to Rome” but went off it when we worked out it would take us a week to leave England. And we can do motorbikes and cars later on, when we are less fit.
Q: How did you come up with the route?
The original plan was to go vaguely round the Alps in a clockwise direction. Then when we opened up our map of Europe there seemed to be a lot more to the right, and one evening we said “how about we aim for Istanbul”. We also calculated that if we cycle for 100km for 100 days (out of 120, so we have some rest days) we could do about 10,000km or maybe 6,000km allowing for wiggles in the route, so we got a piece of string out and tied it into a loop that long and found that we could go to loads of places! If we skip Istanbul (which frankly is a long way out in an odd direction, rather like going to Land’s End) then we can do more in Spain and Portugal or France or even Ireland… let’s see if we can keep thinking flexibly as we go along.
Q: Why are you doing it now?
We will be “never richer, never fitter” than we are now. We have to do it before some horrible health/happiness problem occurs, and we’ve been given the ideal opportunity because we’ve both left work. The question is: will we regret not doing it earlier.
Q: Do you think it is going to change your life?
Yes, we think it will change us a bit because it makes us more confident to do our own journeys. It’s like the decision to move to Dubai – it’s not so much that we wanted to work in Dubai, but we wanted to know we could move to and work in a different country. This will show us that we can travel to places we don’t know without Exodus/Explore/Audley or a rally organiser to do it for us.
Q: Why two of you? Why not one, or many?
Sid has done quite a bit of solo travelling in the past, but Doris hasn’t. We enjoy travelling together – we seem to get on ok – so Sid has waited until Doris finished work. We are not sure how the pressures of an Epic Journey might work with a larger group, let’s get this one done first so we understand ourselves better.
Q: What makes you think you can do it?
Nothing! We’re going to take it one day and one week at a time. In the first week we’ll be thrilled to get to Amsterdam. And then Prague – if we cycle to Prague that would be pretty Epic. After that, every day is a success – for us it’s important not to get fixated on a single headline destination.