As I cycled back from my bike fitting today, the bike actually felt ok under my hands for the first time and I started to relax.And I realised I am quite fear-ful about this trip. Not scared, that’s a state of mind. This is a chemical feeling, the special animalistic fear-chemicals are churning through my blood and making me clumsy and not good at making decisions.
We are trying to manage it by keeping the pressure low – it doesn’t matter if we don’t go the whole way round Europe, or even not to Istanbul, or even not to Prague or Amsterdam. We’ve got 4 months to have a holiday of some sort. It doesn’t matter if we miss the ferry tomorrow, we can simply buy other tickets. It doesn’t matter if we find it too hard even to get to Harwich.
That doesn’t work. The only real cure for this is to get on the road for a few days and find that we can actually do it. Or not.
That chemical feeling is part of "epic". It's a good sign. A necessary condition to meet the requirement of epic. Sid feels it too…he's just stoic.
Yes, I have been musing on the "true" meaning of the word "epic". And I think it also requires being "self-driven" – doing a journey to someone else's timetable, however challenging, does not count in this category. The question has to be faced every morning: am I going to carry on with this even though it might be easier to go home.
It is also possible that having a blog audience will provide a very welcome external-motivation-factor. Maybe that's why other travellers do blogs (doh… Doris has finally caught up with the 21st century…)