Post-tour ponderings

A cycle tourer or traveller is easy to spot, you know when you have spotted a kindred spirit. They walk in a more relaxed, unrushed way and carry themselves without a burden, unless you’re talking about their backpack or overloaded touring bicycles. Simplicity and multi functional clothing have taken over from fashion. And their bargain hunting skills are just superb.

We have only been on one “long”,(compared to our other tours, and compared to other seasoned cyclists, a “short”) two month tour. But even in that period we got settled in and lost our day to day worries and just enjoyed ourselves.

We both have our little jobs to do while we tour but we still help each other out, pretty much like an well-oiled machine. No need to talk about how to pitch or pack the tent for example, we just do it. That is pretty much the only part that we are as home as on tour, the daily grind. The rest of the time we’re relaxing, enjoying the countryside and our time together.

It took us around a week and a bit to get into touring mode. I’m sure that it would be faster if we didn’t do the hit and run tour of Australia like we did and the more we get to do cycling touring.

Getting back was somewhat difficult, not helped by the fact that we had a lodger and had to sleep on the living room floor for a little over a week. Not that that was a problem since we prefer to sleep on our downmats to our bed and most others.

We still woke up at 5am’ish though I think it had become a habit for us since the UK is rather dark in November and London is lacking in the birdsong department. Even when rolling over and sleeping for a bit extra we were up by 8am cooking breakfast. Honestly I was hoping that we would be a bit more active when we got home from two months tour. But arriving the UK in a cold November with snow and then getting hit by a bug that had us bedridden for nearly two weeks put a stop to that.

Other than 4000 photos the only real souvenir we had with us when we got back was my beard, since we didn’t have the space or weight allowance on the flight back. A easy thing to spot a male tourer or traveller by: “Oh, you’ve been touring for around 5 weeks now, haven’t you?” 🙂

We do not have a long tour planned for a while yet, so there is no real reason for me to keep it. Other than that Peli likes it and it does keep my face a bit warmer in winter.

Though the question is, how long after a tour do you shave you beard off? It took you some weeks to get used to it growing now you have to get use to shave it off again every day.