Day #71
Drumul Carului
54/3050km
Day #72
Mușcel
52/3102km
Day #73
Curtea de Argeș
57/3159km
Day #74
Curǎturile
60/3219km
Day #75
Ciupercenii de Olteț
43/3262km
Day #76
Târgiu Jiu
47/3309km
Day #77
REST-DAY
∼∼∼∼∼∼∼∼∼∼
Day #64
Valea Goblii
59/2792km
Day #65
Orlat
55/2847km
Day #66
Racovița
53/2900km
Day #67
Rucăr
53/2953km
Day #68
Şinca Veche
43/2996km
Day #69
REST-DAY
Day #70
REST-DAY
∼∼∼∼∼∼∼∼∼∼
Day #57
Gilău
65/2525km
Day #58
Mărișel
40/2565km
Day #59
Rusești
50/2615km
Day #60
Buceș-Vulcan
45/2660km
Day #61
Brad
30/2690km
Day #62
REST-DAY
Day #63
Deva
43/2733km
∼∼∼∼∼∼∼∼∼∼
“The place is alive with butterflies.”
And snails.
Living jewels dancing in the morning sun
Looking for love
An extension of themselves
Open up your wings
Claim your energies
Lively up a scene blanched with broken shells
Embroider life on dust,
where man made none.
Oblivious to all your nature brings
More precious felt within
Allowed to bear witness
You kissed us on the shin,
on the thigh, and on the cheek
Blushed aside by embarrassment,
Inwardly, a cry
Giggling
Tarred with a little shame
as we recoiled at your stroke
You seemed a little hurt and rolled your wings like in a wilt
Then
as I glanced away,
unfurled your flame and flew away.
Leaving me amongst the shells that stealthily assume
a life I hadn’t seen
behind the veil I’d placed between
Ubiquitous
Themselves performing their merry dance.
Texturing the scene the light danced up
And me
Within its heart
Welcomed back
The orphan child
11:30. E’Leclerc. A guy who has quite clearly had quite a serious stroke going out of his way to communicate with me, which he did – which we did. A beautiful moment of humanity shared.
You see – we can do it 😃
“Feels like we’ve changed climate, doesn’t it?”
16:00. Break. “Yipes!” Brushes grassho… no, cri… , no, er… praying mantis! Standing there, proud as punch – maybe shook out of its exoskeleton by this blundering giant that had just destroyed its slumber.
I was a bit taken aback, too 😱
“Well, stop looking like a blade of grass if you don’t wanna get run over!”
“And you eat men.”
Unless it was a man.
We were both on shaky ground.
~~~~~~~~~~
23:09
Camping
On the coast
Sky is beautiful
Sounds are beautiful
Moods are tetchy.
We’ve noticed, accurately or not, that the wind on this coast veers between two extremes: complete calm and gusty-muthafuck. Tranquility in the morning. Gusty-muthafuck from about sundown (until we-don’t-know-when).
We’ve decided to camp here.
The tent’s swelling in and out like it’s on an overamped ventilator. The noises from outside are impudent thieves belligerently flicking off Finkel and Einhorn’s covers, secure in the knowledge they’re more than enough for our flagging wills.
And we’re tetchy.
Not being able to get a good night’s sleep should help.
In this game, you have to be understanding at all times – and we are fine – but sometimes: one of you will want to go on; one of you may want to stop; one of you will have overlooked something; one of you will absent-mindedly break something.
Sometimes, shit happens.
Which is great for sensitising yourself to the foibles of others while synergetically becoming sensitive to your own – and accepting them all as part and parcel of it all.
We had a couple of incidences today. We rolled over the first, as you do, as just a symptom of two souls who had not had coffee yet. And we were more than ready to acknowledge and apologise when we were the ones at fault at further incidences along the way.
Which is great.
And this evening’s sourness while putting up the tent was probably nothing, too, but coming on top of the further adjusting to the realities of keeping these wheels rolling, could we be approaching times when the shine starts coming off and the negatives speak more loudly?
Now we are doing this
and discovering how we feel within it.
We still speak, act, move in the same way.
We both speak, act, move in our own ways.
How long will they remain?
~~~~~~~~~~
Oh, I don’t know. It’s just been an on-and-off day today. Sadly, it seems like much of the off is going to continue through the night, powered by this coastal wind.
~~~~~~~~~~
via Slovenia 2018
A brief encounter that we had with beautiful Slovenia back in 2018, presented in a selection of images.
Follow the link Slovenia 2018 if you wish to see some of our memories of the regions as we experienced them on our bicycles. Enjoy 🚵🏽♂️💚🚵🏽♀️
via Italy 2018
We are in a process of uploading our 2018 Touring Gallery. The journey took us from Ferrara in Italy through Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia to Bulgaria. An incredible experience it was.
Follow the link Italy 2018 if you wish to see the images from our brief yet beautiful Italian journey from Ferrara to Gorizia, before entering Slovenia. Enjoy ✌🏼🚵🏽♂️🚵🏽♀️
2150. In the tent. On the coast. You automatically feel like exclaiming: “We’ve made it!” And I’m sure that will be the tag accompanying a photo or two relating to today. It does, however, have a sounding of finality to it: a sense of destination reached – and we don’t really have a destination. Is there such a thing as a destination, anyway? There are landmarks and achievements, but nothing really stops – ever. Even when we reach a stage where we’re not conscious of moving, we will be – on some level. Even when others see us as no more than atoms and cells and molecules, we will still be journeying on: our voices and actions reverberating somewhere, spreading ever further. We may not be conscious, in the traditionally accepted sense, of this continuous dispersal, but a bundle of experiences that became conveniently labelled ‘we’ will be out there, living their own conscious lives, experiencing their own experiences, being experienced, and becoming further experiences; only detached from this frame, so they can no longer be acknowledged and claimed by this thing called ‘I’.
But, we’ve made it to the sea; well, the ocean – as Agnieszka keeps reminding us both. And like meeting and crossing the Czech border, it does feel like some kind of landmark. Smiles beamed broader, spirits rose higher, and that selfie-stick came out for maybe only the second time – the other time being at that Czech border. And it felt spontaneously, unforcedly joyous, so who cares what it meant? or whether it should mean any particular thing? It meant what it did as it happened, for no other reason than it did; and if that was a cliché, then there’s a reason that clichés exist.
And it did crown a wonderful day. A chilled get up in a place you’d never sell as an idyllic overnight stop in a holiday brochure, but which turned out to be a beautiful peaceful place to wake up in, take it easy, breakfast, chat, stretch, and ease into the day while the heavily condensated camping gear dried out. Then a fabulous ride through the flat marshlands of sand reclaimed from the sea, which make up this part of France. Distant distant horizons, lovely weather, the synchronised surfacing fish posse: a natural wonder I will never forget, a man named Geoff, a dog named beautiful, a beaver beavering, some nature reserves of storks, the falcons, the buzzards, the dinner by the road – then we meet the coast as our day’s riding draws to an close.
Lovely.
Using that word a lot this Summer. Lazy writing? Limited vocabulary? Perhaps, but it seems the aptest in my book, so what’s the point of using others? That’d be like using socks as gloves because you felt you were overusing the gloves. Oh, the socks may serve some glovely function, but the fit wouldn’t quite be right, and there’d be a sense of discomfort whenever you wore them.
So, ‘lovely’ it is.
~~~~~~~~~~
