RSS FeedsThoughts From the Far End of Europe
by Tom on Sunday, October 21st, 2007We arrived in Istanbul a couple of days ago, cycling into this sprawling monolith of a city along one of the two main routes against about 9 manic lanes of rush-hour traffic, minibuses and not-so-mini-buses.
That experience recovered from, we have again been enjoying the hospitality of a variety of city-dwellers courtesy of the Couchsurfing Project website, which has again demonstrated its increasingly invaluable efficiency in finding local people in urban areas with the desire to help and host travellers - all over the world.
Our arrival in the city marks the completion of the European leg of Ride Earth. We have successfully - albeit not without a couple of minor medical and mechanical hiccups - crossed Europe, from England to Turkey, by bicycle; a journey of almost exactly 5000km of pedalling, through 12 countries over 122 days of trial and tribulation. The experience has been richly rewarding in so many ways, and now I feel the need to take stock of how the last 4 months of submission to the whims of the world has affected my outlook on life and how it has affected my future dreams for the expedition.
