Thoughts before our departure

As we are writing these words, we are sitting in our empty living room in Baden where the only furniture consists of our bicycles, our bicycle bags and the sleeping bags. We even forgot to keep the coffeemaker for another day, which Lisa will regret soon enough. We just came back from our storage room, where we put our ordinary life in a box.

Tomorrow we’ll start our journey into the world. What goes on in our minds right before our departure? We aren’t ready to deal with all the emotions involved in this goodbye just yet, because we were too busy organizing, packing and running around. Maybe this makes saying goodbye a little easier? The last few weeks have been though with the last evenings spent with our friends, the last visit to the weekly market, the last run in the forest; but at the same time we were excited about the trip ahead, this new unknown chapter of our lives. Many questions were running through our heads – how will our bodies adapt to the exertion? How does it feel to say goodbye for an uncertain time?

The last 2.5 years we have been planning our trip; thinking about the most interesting cycling routes, getting our gear together and of course saving. We set July 2020 as our departure date. Somehow it felt important to us to have a fixed departure date, otherwise dreams and plans have the tendency to just vanish and turn into “might-have-beens”.

We quit our jobs and we bid farewell to many things in the last months. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world and turned everything we knew upside down. In April 2020 our landlord asked us, if we still plan on departing this summer. We looked at each other and decided we’ll do it. We’ll try it. As far as possible and as long as it feels right for us. If not, we’ll change our plans.

Now in July there is a time where things look a little brighter in Europe and traveling seems possible again. Nevertheless, we aren’t sure, whether it would be appropriate to start our journey and how the people would react to us. Would it be selfish to go through with our plans? We don’t have any answers to these questions; but if we don’t go, how are we ever going to find out? We want to meet others with respect and at eye level and learn new things about the world and us every day. We want to stay curious and we’ll have to adapt to new situations constantly.

We’ll be pedaling the world slowly with a lot of time to be outdoors and to explore all those lesser known places in between. We are thrilled to get going and we are facing our departure day tomorrow equally with joy and melancholy. This is really it. Yallah Bye!