Stiff Upper Lip has finally given way, and I’m coming home. By train.
Already delayed from Bischofshofen in Austria by two hours (this does after all involve the Deutsche Bundesbahn, whose trains spectacularly no longer run on time) to Ulm, whence onwards tomorrow to the Hoek-Harwich ferry.
I’ve had 10 days of riding temperatures at a regular 35 degrees, and next week I read it’s is going to be even hotter across the bits of middle Europe I was intending to cycle.
As the Germans succinctly say, Wozu? What’s the point.
OK, the Hungarians’ defeat at Mohács, and things that happen at sea, are worse.
But a lot has today come together, with the heat the final straw. (Will people wake up at last and realise globally that this is already the climate breakdown future, and going very quickly to get much worse? I doubt it.)
In the context of which, the massive weight of my solo bike, even sans front panniers, really tells, as does the speed with which the batteries discharge.
The roughness of public discourse in Austria is beginning to wear (the UK for all its Brexit idiocies is SO much kinder).
After my beloved Sony camera was lifted in Graz, I’m extremely wary of leaving the bike for even a minute. Loo? Food shopping? Post-traumatic fears, I know, but 1200 Euros down the pan did hurt.
Discovering that the tunnel I needed through the Alps is still shut for repairs and feeling cut off the wrong side of the hills didn’t help – though the bus replacement was actually quite efficient, even if caught with only 30 seconds to spare.
Power cut in my Gasthaus room in the middle of last night meant starting the day with my essential kit only partly charged.
Fines and costs continue to accumulate (£400 and counting) for Jutta’s and my road trip in May through Central and Eastern Europe, unaware of the new vignette charging systems. (We are now!) And there’s no leniency.
Of course there’s the intensity too of getting the bike motor replaced, without which I wouldn’t have been in Graz for the camera theft.
And my smashed smartphone screen and having to buy a new device…
Meeting two fellow septuagenarian solo cyclists over breakfast this morning was also somewhat dispiriting, with e-bikes that are faster, lighter and very much longer-lasting than mine. 150km per charge against my 50.
And to think that in 2019 before the pandemic, I was hoping, even planning (had the air tickets tentatively booked), to cycle solo on this very bike, not then electrified, from Moscow through Volgograd and Grozny (I kid you not) to Teheran.
How the world has changed. Maybe I have too?
Time maybe at 75 at last to get real and be, and do, ordinary?
Though I did like my parting gift from language teacher David as I set out for home from Hungary a century ago on Thursday last week, of a carrier bag with the question, What’s Your Superpower?
“Mine?” it asks. “I speak Hungarian.”
Maybe with this trip I’ve got something out of my system.
Maybe I don’t need to do this kind of thing again.
Maybe, now with its shiny new motor and weighing half a ton, it’s time after nearly 20 years to sell the Nomad
Maybe it’s time, metaphorically as this is Jutta’s territory, with Voltaire to tend my garden.
Maybe I might at last write those bigger books about attachment-informed EMDR and what it’s been like these past 75 years to be (whatever it is) autistic in a world that’s still so often such hard work.
Maybe it’s time to stop trying so bloody hard.
In which sense, thanks for reading these things to the end (you must have if you’re in this deep today) and, DB permitting (though as I write the delay is even longer), home on Monday.
Some final pix…
