One person, one steel bike, and a slow line drawn east from the Atlantic. No support van, no schedule, no particularly good reason — which turns out to be the best reason of all.
I'm Marin. For eleven years I sat in the same office in a city I won't bore you with, got reasonably good at a job I'd stopped being curious about, and watched the same forty minutes of commute go by twice a day. Last winter I did the arithmetic — savings, the lease running out, a knee that the physio said had "a few good mountains left in it" — and the numbers came out in favour of leaving. So I left. The plan, if you can call it that, is to ride from Lisbon as far east as the road and my nerve will carry me: across Iberia, over the Pyrenees, along the Mediterranean and up the Danube, and eventually, if everything holds, into the Caucasus.
Everything I own that matters is bolted to or buckled onto a steel touring frame — a Stanforth Kibo+, deliberately old-fashioned, the kind of bike you can have welded back together in a village that's never heard of carbon fibre. It is heavy and slow and utterly trustworthy, which is more or less what I'm trying to be myself. The full kit list, with all my opinions about it, lives on the gear page; where I've actually been is on the route page.
There's no studio and no plan behind these pages. Entries get written wherever the day ends and there's a plug — the corner of a café in a town I'll have forgotten the name of by next week, the porch of the tent with the stove hissing, occasionally the deck of a ferry. I write them longhand-fast on a cracked phone while the legs recover, fix the worst of the typos the next morning, and post them whenever the signal comes back. If a paragraph reads like it was written by someone slightly out of breath, that's because it usually was.
I keep this little site quiet on purpose — no tracking, no list to join, nothing to sell. It's a logbook I happen to leave the door open on, more than a thing I'm trying to grow.
The honest way to follow this is to check in now and then; new entries land on the journal whenever I've ridden somewhere worth writing about. If you want to say hello, ask where the next stretch goes, or — best of all — offer a patch of garden to pitch a tent on somewhere down the line, the address is below and I read every message, even if the reply waits for the next town with wifi.