A reggae legend once told me, ‘the hardest part is the start!’ But let me tell you, Johnny Osbourne never faced the world of long-distance cycling. The start may be tough, but stopping, oh, stopping is a beast of its own. It’s like vertigo, a swirling chaos that leaves you dizzy and disoriented, a sailor back on solid ground after weeks at sea or a diver breaking the surface after a deep plunge. Everything becomes surreal, nothing makes sense, and you yearn for something to hold on to, but there’s nothing, just an immovable void.
For fourteen relentless days, I pushed forward, covering at the very least a hundred kilometers a day, as landscapes, faces, and weather slowly morphed around me. From scorching 43-degree heat to 10-degree cold which by then felt like -10! I rode on. My journey, a long bike ride from my new home in Portugal to my old abode in Belgium, driven by a selfish urge, wrapped in a cloak of nobility.