My last one here from this trip, waiting at the end of a day’s training (the other kind) for the Hoek ferry across to Harwich where Jutta and normality await in the morning.
As one of my Facebook friends put it, in one of the really lovely and supportive messages I’ve had, it’s a bittersweet moment – the closing of a big chapter that’s had to do over many decades with travel, language, Hungary, marriages, cycling…
And here I am, taking at last perhaps the Road More Travelled back to Sheringham where after all I grew up and to the welcome of my (largely, another story) reconstituted immediate family.
Jutta actually said she’d love me to come home, and that was so nice.
I’ll be very sad to say goodbye to Nomad, now the perfect Round-The-World eBike, but just too, too heavy for me now.
I’ve tweaked and adjusted and added to the old girl over the years, as to Daisy2 our tandem (with whom adventures maybe still await), and the detail is now pretty damn good.
The motor of course, but now too (see pictures below) the really clever chain guard – the other positive from Graz (don’t mention the Sony) – as well as the Steerstopper that prevents the front wheel from flipping to the side and dropping the whole thing as so often used to happen.
The Brooks saddle is nearly 50 years old and the real soft deal, not of course being relinquished. But the 14-speed Rohloff hub will go, repaired 2008 when the flange split under the intense spoke tension which makes Thorn wheels virtually unbreakable.
The S&S couplings have been so clever that allow the bike (as with Daisy) not just to be folded but to be split completely in two, meaning she was easily loadable into the back of István’s Hungarian hatchback.
And talking of Hungarian, I do take home with me one of the main purposes of this crazy venture, to be able to write a whole long email to my teacher Dávid back in Szeged telling my tale of losses big and small since we parted company 11 lifetime days ago.
Chat GPT corrected me very kindly, explaining my grammatical mistakes (got a couple of verb tenses badly and unnecessarily wrong – the definite olvastad for heaven’s sake, not the indefinite olvastál), but it felt good.
Eredmény. Result.
Also coming home with me is the unexpected pleasure of having been able these past two months, including those first weeks driving round Transylvania with Jutta (DON’T MENTION THE TOLLS), to write, just for fun and not for broadcast, and to know that not everyone thought this exercise a self-indulgent waste of time.
Which is what the inner voice still says, 75 years on…. Therapy needed there. I gather there’s this thing called EMDR. Maybe I should try it…
So, vége van. Das (vorläufige) Ende. Конец, пока. Fin, pour le moment. Thanks for all your kindness, and of course, a few concluding pix, with captions.
