… survives first contact with the enemy.
So who or what are the enemies? We reckon they are:
1. Our minds. We will get frightened or bored or simply fed up with unpacking in a different hotel every night and want to come home. This is the great unknown that we simply can’t prepare for. However if we find it happening, we can always just stop somewhere for a few days to decompress and try to get our mojo back. It’s a tricky balance, because “bad experiences make for good memories”. In the end, however, this Epic Journey is a holiday, and we’re doing it for fun.
2. Our bodies. We will get injured or just find we are completely crocked up. It goes without saying (and so you know I am going to say it anyway) that we are lean, mean, fighting machines, especially Sid. However we are secretly uncertain that 6 hours a day on drop-handlebar touring bikes is really the best way of treating our “mid-life” bodies. But if we have problems we can pick a route that goes round rather than over mountains, and we can use ferries to move quickly across the Mediterranean.
3. Our equipment. This is not really an enemy, but we are very, very dependent on our bikes. During the preparation we actually ended up buying new bikes because our 15 year-old favourites just seemed to be worn out. However that’s not a brilliant way of starting because the new bikes haven’t had enough time to bed down yet. We also have to make some careful choices of repair equipment: too little equipment and we might get stuck in the mountains, too much equipment and we won’t be able to get up the mountains in the first place.
4. Other people. Most cyclists travel most days without getting knocked off their bikes. But 120 days is a lot of days, and some countries are more cycle-friendly than others. We might also have our bikes stolen or simply fall foul of some unpleasant people. We’ll be careful rather than timid in our choice of routes – we are, after all, middle-of-the-road cyclists.
The weather, by the way, is not an enemy. It simply exists, and we will have to cope with it.