Europe by bike: welcome to the blog
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The home straight - Part II
The route through Gravesend is signposted but long since out of use; we end up in a dead end alley behind an abandoned factory and next to a huge stack of burnt car tyres. So we backtrack and follow the road until the path picks up again. The vegetation here is hardy and stoic, salt loving marsh plants that put up with the flack from industrial sites and heavy human traffic. I know my way home from here. I now know my way to Holland from here.
It is surreal - towns that have previously been significant waypoints, are now suddenly placed between themselves at tiny intervals. I realise how small the world is, and how big. It takes maybe two hours to span the physical reaches of my childhood, pedalling and following the coast path. All the things I know, the avenues of poplar that reach up forever, the hills here that used to be a day's ride, that grassy bank where I slept in a bivi bag for the first time, come and go quickly like fragments from a waking dream.
We pass through it all into familiar towns, actual places where we've been before. A girl drives by and I realise we shared a class together at school. But I am suddenly a stranger here; I am too sun-tanned and too unkempt. I am exotic in a clunky, misplaced way.
And I realise that I will never be able to describe what we did. I won't be able to point at things and liken them to this or that, because it's all different. The world is a big place until you're back in the small town. I realise how relieved I am to have kept my diary as a public blog, because all I can do now is shake my head and look at my feet and say that a lot happened, before I run out of words and run out of feeling.
It was like a big, big dream. It was like the best book you've ever read, except you could only read it once and you were inside it, living out the story. While we were reading our book; meeting its characters and traveling through its pages and chapters, you were reading your book.
The time passed for all of us; you and me and all of us, we all did something in the last three months. We all did lots of things. All that Willow and I did was, really, the same thing, every day. We got on our bikes and we rode them.
And now the pages of that book are closed, and when I pull it back off the shelf of my memory, it will be a highlight reel, a changing, flickering film spool that throws up only what I can remember.
In a couple days time, I will receive back the scanned images from the 17 rolls of film I shot while we were away. I will of course share the images here on my website, hopefully in another format - maybe a book, but a real book that stays the same and doesn't change over time like memories do.
This is why I'm glad I kept a blog - I can point at it whenever I need to remember or tell the story. Because I'm not there anymore, but I was there when I wrote it all. I was there when the mountains were real and could be climbed on a bike, when the sea really did roar off to my right and when the two of us really did go for miles and miles and miles together, just to chase an idea before it became the most incredible thing I've ever done.