Following my incredible experience at the Paralympics, and my over month long stay in Paris, I began riding again to the end of Europe and towards Africa on Sunday, September 8th. I set off from Le Peloton Cafe in Paris, where I had graciously been allowed to store my bike during my time in Paris, and where together with their bike mechanic, Evan, we had upgraded my brakes to hydraulics, which were crucial for my later riding through the mountains. Evan and his visiting friend, Aaron, offered to ride out of Paris with me, and after sharing a celebratory toast of the new French whiskey I had given Evan as a thank you gift for his help with my bike, we waved goodbye to the baristas and confused customers at the cafe and began the journey once again.
Thank you Le Peloton and Evan for all your help and support!
It was great to ride out of Paris with Evan and Aaron and have some company, but soon, after cresting a long hill, Evan and Aaron racing each other to the top and me lugging my tank of a bike a ways behind, we parted ways and Evan and Aaron looped back towards Paris and I was on my own once again. The first day leaving from Paris was challenging, my head not feeling quite ready to dive back into the adventure. My mood soured further when I slipped out on my bike the next rainy, muddy morning, and covered my bike and myself with gunky mud. I felt especially frustrated and internally lost upon realizing, while pushing my bike through rutted, muddy, and root-filled trails running along a small river under drizzling rain, that this is exactly the experience that I thought I wanted from my ride: getting lost down hidden paths in new regions of new countries, enjoying the privilege of freedom, all I needed for life strapped to my bike, and nothing to do each day but pedal a little further. This was the adventure… But in that moment, wet and filthy and pushing my heavily laden bike, I couldn’t find connection with my adventurous spirit, and I just felt frustrated, lonely, and internally lost, wondering what was the point of such a foolish long bike ride.
Muddy explorations in the forests south of Paris
Arriving to Fontainebleau, I had a reset of my mood and mindset towards my ride. I met Elliot, a fellow bikepacker who had recognized the dynamo light on my bike, and we began talking. Elliot had worked on a project in collaboration with Bikepacking.com using bike travel to raise awareness for sustainability and local indigenous communities in wetland regions surrounding Bogota, Colombia, which are responsible for filtering most of the fresh water that nourishes the large city. Talking with another passionate bike traveller that was also trying to use bikepacking to do some good was inspiring, and re-connected me to the soul of my ride. I also explored around the beautiful palace gardens of Fontainebleau (the first of many gorgeous palaces I would see in my ride across France), which got me re-excited for the amazing places I had the privilege to see and experience on my journey. I decided to take a break day once I reached the city of Orléans, to reset and make a more concrete plan for the rest of my ride through France. Creating a plan helped relieve pressure from myself for how to structure each day, and enabled me to be more present and excited for all I would see and do along the ride. I stayed in Orléans with Bastien and his parents, my friendly Warmshowers hosts. We enjoyed two delicious dinners together, and shared lots of stories of bike adventures (Bastien and his partner Louise had cycled together for 9-months all across Europe the previous year, and Bastien was planning a bikepacking trip through the mountains of the French Massif Central while I was there). I left Orléans with a big smile after thanking Bastien and his parents for their hospitality, feeling optimistic and enthusiastic about my ride again. This marked the beginning of a beautiful segment of my journey.
The palace gardens in Fontainebleau
Ancient Roman fortresses (at Yevre-le-Chatel), and what’s more French than a baguette vending machine on the roadside?
Saying a grateful goodbye to Bastien and his father!
My ride out from Orléans actually turned out to be the farthest ride of my whole journey across Europe, at 152 kilometers. It began flat and beautiful, cruising along the Loire river on a smooth gravel track. A friendly older German cyclist caught me up on the path, his bike also loaded with supplies for what looked like a long travel, and he asked where I was headed. He was impressed and encouraging when I told him my goal to ride to South Africa. His name was Matthias, and I learned he was very recently retired (he had just officially finished his job about a week prior), and he was himself setting off on a multi-stage cycling journey throughout Europe, the first stage of which would take him from Bordeau in France, to Cabo de São Vicente in Portugal, the most southwestern point of Europe. He was now riding along the Loire in order to catch his train to Bordeau to officially start his main ride. Matthias was a funny, thoughtful, and supportive cyclist, and the kilometers riding together and sharing our stories flew by. Eventually, though, I needed to break off from the track to visit the Chateau de Chambord, and Matthias needed to continue to catch his train, so we waved eachother a jovial farewell and thanks for the company.
The Chateau de Chambord was a true wonder! A real-life Disney castle, with white stone walls, adorned with decorative windows and rounded into wide columns at each corner, and an intricate slate roof topped with cupolas and pointed spires. I did a full round of the castle, admiring the perfectly manicured green gardens, symmetrical, hedge-cut trees lining the walkway to the grand entrance, and peering across the wide moat. I could imagine sparkling princesses leaning from the upper windows and waving to admirers below, or Rapunzel letting down her shining, golden hair from one of the high towers.
I had one of the most profound moments of my ride at the Etang de la Roche-Chevreux, a small lake where I decided to camp for the night. I arrived to the lake early at 5:30pm, and I relished the long 2 and a half hours of sunlight left in the day with nothing to do. Once the sun set, I admired the crystal reflection of the moon on the still surface of the lake. Brushing my teeth, I peered up at the clear night sky, and I was blown away by the stars. A snapshot of the magic of the universe and our existence struck me. I laid down in my puffy black jacket, on a small patch of grass next to my tent, gazing up at the stars. I marveled at the scale of it all. How personal problems melt away when the nearly infinite universe is considered. But also, what an unbelievable gift it is to be a part of the universe. To experience a small snippet of the grand, ultimately unknowable, but undoubtedly beautiful cosmic storyline. To play a part, no matter how small, amongst the stars. The experience left me feeling grateful for my existence, content to be present, and meaningfully connected with our miraculous world. A mystical fog drifted off the lake the next morning, shrouding my campsite, slowly evaporating as the warm sun rose.
The perfect Disney castle of Chateau de Chambord
The lake that left me feeling grateful to be able to play for a while under the stars
I arrived just outside the city of Limoges, and wolfed down a hefty dinner from a fast-food kebab shop, the only place selling food amongst the auto shops, ugly strip malls, and industrial factories in the outskirts of the city. It was nearing sunset. I had planned to ride through and past the city to find a place to camp on the other side. But navigating the busy streets with non-sensical bike lanes that weaved back and forth across the street or disappeared abruptly with no warning, proved treacherous in the fading light. I passed a group of cyclists in yellow fluorescent vests, and they passed me again once I was stumped by another randomly ending bike lane. One of the men made the awkward, arduous cross over the busy street to see if I needed any help. Explaining my predicament, he told me there weren’t any places to camp nearby, but he offered with a smile for me to set up my tent in the garden of his home a few kilometers away. I happily accepted, and we sealed the deal with a handshake. I learned him and his buddies were part of a cycling organization, with the name “Veli-Velo” on the back of their matching yellow vests. I followed the vest of my host and savior for the night, and I learned his name was Jerome. He took me to his family flat stacked over a few stories and with bicycles of all shapes and sizes stacked in the entryway. I squeezed my behemoth of a bike through the tight doorway and added it to the pile. That evening I met Jerome’s whole family, his wife and his three daughters, two of them twins. They were all so welcoming and didn’t mind that there was a strange American bikepacker staying the night with them, and rather were happy hosting a visitor. Jerome had founded the Veli-Velo organization and was passionate about promoting bikes for transport, travel, and health in the city. He was also teaching engineering and mechatronics at the local university in Limoges. I admired Jerome and his family’s values and lifestyle. Jerome offered me a plate of delicious homemade mushroom pasta, and I happily accepted even after having already eaten a huge dinner just an hour or so before. In the end, Jerome and his wife insisted I sleep inside in the guest bedroom, not wanting to make me set up my tent in the dark, and I fell gratefully and blissfully asleep on the comfortable mattress. Before I left in the morning, Jerome gave me many tasty pastries to take with me for my ride. I beamed in the selfie we took together before I jumped back on my bike.
It was special when someone so spontaneously offered such kindness to me on the road, completely upending their own plans for the evening in an unprompted and so-appreciated gesture of radical hospitality. Without question, Jerome was one of the nicest and friendliest people I met on my entire journey. To notice a traveling cyclist in need of help, and to stop and offer a bed, delicious dinner, copious breakfast sweets, and so warmly and openly welcome me into their home and family life in the spur of the moment. It was an act I admired and learned a lot from. I hoped to be ready when it is my own opportunity to pass it on and give aid and hospitality and spontaneous, open kindness to other weary travelers or anyone in need.
Thank you so much Jerome and fam!
Following Limoges, the riding got hilly, flanking the western edge of the Massif Central, a highland, mountainous region in south-central France. I climbed up the long ascents, marveling at the lush views, then giddily freewheeled down the descents, to then climb straight back up again. One of the primary stops I had planned into my route was the caves of Lascaux, famous for their prehistoric cave paintings estimated to be 17,000-22,000 years old. The original cave with the real paintings has been closed to the public since 1963 due to damage to the delicate paintings and ecosystem of the caves by millions of tourists visiting per year, but there have now been multiple replica caves built. I visited the newest replica, Lascaux IV, a modern, glass-walled museum building that housed the replica caves underneath the building. It took away a bit from the experience of cave exploration riding down a shining silver elevator, but I was impressed with the engineering and technical skill needed to re-create the original caves so exactly, down to the minute curvature of the cave walls, and the precise positions of each of the drawings. The paintings depict mostly large animals, such as deer, horses, stags, and Aurochs (an extinct bovine species and ancestors to modern domestic cattle), and show the deep connection and spiritual reverence our ancestors had for our natural world, and the plants and animals that surrounded them and that they interacted with and relied on for survival. It was a connection to nature that I was feeling more in-touch with than I ever had on my ride, pedaling under the elements and sleeping wild.
I crossed into the Occitanie region of France, an area with rich history, and its own traditional language. My first planned stop in Occitanie was the Goufre de Padirac. Goufre is French for Chasm, and this was truly a chasm, 75 meters deep and 33 meters in diameter, an enormous, gaping hole in the earth. The chasm was formed around 10,000 years ago when the roof covering the deep cave collapsed from rainwater infiltrating small cracks in the limestone. In the old Occitanian language of the region, Padirac means “Devil’s Pit”, and according to legend, the Devil, pursued by Saint Martin riding a Donkey, created the chasm by powerfully stamping on the ground, then dared the saint to jump over it. With a miraculous leap, the Donkey flew over the chasm, leaving its hoof prints at the edge of the cliff, and the saint saved the souls the Devil had captured. The Devil vanished into the depths of the Goufre de Padirac. I took a tour of the chasm and underground cave system, and it did feel like descending into the bowels of the Earth down the long staircase to the cave floor. The audio tour was told through a dramatized version of the first explorers of the caves, Edouard-Alfred Martel, his brother, and another daring explorer. They made the first descent into Goufre de Padirac in 1889, with just a 180-rung rope ladder, a sling, and an army-issue magnetic telephone. After their first expedition was stopped by the deep underground river, they returned to the cave with a small canvas boat, nicknamed “the crocodile”, to venture deeper into the caves along the expansive underground river system. It was a bold, inspiring, if not a little foolhardy adventure by a gang of intrepid explorers stepping foot into a wholly unknown, underground labyrinth. With modern mapping equipment, we now know the cave system extends over 40km, with the underground river flowing 20km at a depth of 130 meters below the surface of the earth. They were magnificent caverns and caves, and we got to take our own short boat ride along the underground river, like a subterranean Venice. Every inch of the caves was strange, rock formations protruding from molten walls and bumpy floors. Weird, beautiful limestone mushrooms, huge, contorted rock columns, and delicate ripples in the walls, forming bulging veins and arteries in the stone. Everything took on alien textures and shapes. I had never seen anything like it, and began to understand the curious joys of spelunking.
The green hills of the Massif Central and medieval villages (Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche)
Cave paintings of Lascaux
Charming red-bricked town of Collonges-la-Rouge
The weird, trippy shapes within the Goufre de Padirac
I stayed one night in Rocamadour, a medieval town built directly into a dramatic cliffside. Leaving Rocamadour, I met two Canadian cyclists, Darryl and Jane, who were excited about my ride. We met again in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, another beautiful old village, with red-roofed stone buildings built on a slanted hillside, and an imposing, Game-of-Thrones-esque cathedral overlooking the town on the high, rocky clifftop. Darryl and Jane offered to buy me lunch, and I ate my first ever foie gras, which I didn’t think was worth sickeningly overfeeding the ducks for. It was great to have a little company and conversation, though, and I thanked Darryl and Jane deeply.
Searching for a camp spot in the evening, I turned up a dirt farm road, and spotted a singular perfect tree perched on the hilltop, bathed in an inviting golden light, and backed by cozy, pink-hued Ghibli-style clouds. My mind just said: “I want to go to there”, and I set up my camp by the isolated, wise tree. That night, just after watching a blazing sunset on one side of the horizon, I turned around, and saw an enormous, glowing, blood-red moon slowly ascending from the opposite horizon. It was the most spectacular moonrise I’ve ever seen, with the blood-red tint slowly shifting to an orange, then yellow-ish shimmer, then eventually to its monochrome, luminescent silver. It was a wonderful night, playing ukulele under the glimmering stars next to my tent, my bike, and the perfect tree, and feeling so grateful to be outside witnessing these magical moments of nature that I was too often totally oblivious to at home. I awoke in the morning to a glorious sunrise, and just felt blessed. It was the spot that kept on giving, and I left feeling very attached to that hilltop with the perfect tree. I rode past the Najac castle, through the pretty medieval town of Puycelsi, and through a frustrating maze of construction, before arriving to the city of Toulouse in Southwest France.
Dramatic, cliffside Rocamadour
Meeting Darryl and Jane again for lunch in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie
Such a special hilltop and special tree
Endless hilly vistas of Occitanie and the final ice cream before Toulouse
From Toulouse, I took a break off my bike and jumped on a train back to Brussels, Belgium to participate in the ENIL Freedom Drive (read more about my impactful experience at the Freedom Drive march and event here). Upon returning to Toulouse after midnight after a long travel day with a cramped Flixbus and delayed train, and educational but busy days in Belgium volunteering and trying to ensure the event all ran smoothly, my immune system took a big hit, and I got sick for the first time on the journey. I stayed in Toulouse a couple days with my great Warmshowers hosts Hélène and Gautier and their two children. We cooked some delicious dinners and joined for a small festival in their neighborhood with live music. Hélène was also working at an organization that promoted bike travel, and we got along well. Unfortunately, my sore, scratchy throat didn’t recover much in my days off in Toulouse, and I left from Hélène and Gautier’s place still feeling sick and not too enthusiastic about my ride. I decided to find a hostel in the next city, Carcassonne, and rest another day or two.
Carcassonne was an interesting, double-sided city, with an impressive, expansive castle at its heart, with a charming (if not a little touristy) old town inside the castle walls. But the rest of the city outside the old castle was one of the ugliest and least inviting cities I’d ever visited. My days in Carcassonne were marred by self-doubt and over-pressuring myself, losing sight once again of the point of my ride, and feeling overwhelmed by the whole experience and how far it had drifted in many ways from the original expectations and idea I had when I first began dreaming about riding all the way across Europe and Africa years before. I was burning myself out, and it was in Carcassonne, with the help of a call with my mom, that I first began to consider the idea of taking a break from my journey once I finished riding across Europe before jumping into Africa. I did not make a concrete decision immediately, but giving myself permission just to think about the idea of a break let my mind unwind a bit and released some of the unsustainable pressure I was putting onto myself.
The colorful Couvent de Jacobins and tower of the Basilica of Saint-Sernin in Toulouse
Thank you Hélène and Gautier for hosting me!
The impressive old castle of Carcassonne
Finding a nice little hide-out, “Into the Wild” style
Leaving Carcassonne, I felt much better than when I arrived, and riding into the dramatic, mountainous landscapes of southwest Occitanie and the foothills of the Pyrenees quickly re-energized my spirits. One of the other guests at the hostel in Carcassonne had told me about the Cathar castles on my way to the Mediterranean sea, and he said they were sights I shouldn’t miss. So I re-mapped my route to include a couple on my way south to the coast, and damn, I am happy I did! My expectations for castles had already grown quite high after seeing the sprawling old city of Carcassonne, but the Cathar castles were truly sights to behold. The first castle I rode to was the Chateau de Peyrepertuse, perhaps the most magnificent of the Cathar castles. Perched high into a craggy, sheer white limestone cliff, the castle is almost camouflaged with it’s high white stone walls, only perceptible from the ragged rock by their sharp geometric angles and perfectly rounded columns. The clifftop castle was visible far before I reached it, and it was a long, steep climb up hairpin bends to the foot of the chateau.
One of the “five sons of Carcassonne”, five ancient castles in the southwestern corner of France situated atop unassailable rocky peaks, Peyrepertuse, or Pèirapertusés in the ancient Occitan language, meaning “pierced stone”, was the biggest of the five sons, with an area as vast as the castle of Carcassonne itself. The first historical references to the castle appear as early as 806 AD, and the castle played important historical and military roles all the way to the 17th century. In the 1100’s and 1200’s, the castle was home to the Cathars, from whom it gets its name and current prestige. The Cathars were a very early Christian sect (before the advent of the protestant revolution), that had fundamentally different beliefs rooted in christianity than Catholics. Cathar christianity was influenced and integrated ideas from Eastern beliefs and traditions, and Cathars believed in the existence of two gods: a good god in heaven, and an evil god (satan) that ruled over the mortal realm. In Cathar faith, humans were angles fallen or tempted to Earth by Satan, and it is every human’s ultimate purpose to renounce the Earthly pleasures of the world and become enlightened. Cathars believed in reincarnation, and that every soul would continue to be reborn until that soul had fully relinquished the devil’s pleasures, and then would return to heaven to reunite with god and other angels upon passing. The catholics labeled the Cathars as heretics, and launched the Albigensian crusade where most Cathars were slaughtered and the Cathar castles seized. It was a fascinating, bloody history, but exploring the castles the Cathars left behind was incredible, and the views from the crumbling walls were breathtaking. I then visited the Chateau de Queribus, another smaller Cathar castle down a fun, gravel bikepacking trail along the side of the rolling mountains. After joyous, but tiring riding up and down the mountains of the Cathar castles, the road eventually angled downhill and the vegetation and environment got drier and warmer as I closed in on the Mediterranean. On October 4th, I arrived to the shimmering blue Mediterranean Sea under a clear sky with warm sunshine beating down, and I happily breathed in the salty air and dipped my feet into the lapping blue waves.
Here comes the Chateau de Peyrepertuse (on the right) and a long climb
The awesome castle of Peyrepertuse on top of dramatic cliffs with jaw-dropping views
On my way to the castle of Queribus. And wow, I came from way over there?!
Excitement at reaching the Mediterranean Sea!
Arriving to the Mediterranean Sea all the way from Finland was meaningful for me. The accomplishment of the ride felt more tangible, and many great memories and experiences and the challenges from the ride so far flooded into my mind sitting on the beach. It was a moment of internal celebration for how far I’d come. It hadn’t been easy to get there, with many long hills to climb and feelings of self-doubt, pointlessness, and overwhelm to overcome, but it felt good to look back on all the ways I’d grown already from the ride. But the hills I climbed to reach the sea were nothing compared to the mountains ahead as I gazed far into the distance at the mountain peaks of the Pyrenees awaiting me on the next chapter of my ride…
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