By Bike: From Lisbon, Portugal to France

By Bike: From Lisbon, Portugal to France
Oeiras, Portugal October 21, 2007
Homepage: http://canciondelvagabundo.googlepages.com

My New Steed.

Mira and her decked out ride.

This is the plan. Mira and I just bought two new, blue mountain bikes from the Decathlon in Lisbon yesterday. We then attached a couple of gear racks and rear view mirrors on them and then set out to scavenge the city in search of thrown out materials that could serve as baggage boxes. We found a couple of large plastic milk crates that will do the trick and came up with a strategy for sticking them to the bikes. We are now just about ready to begin this journey, which should take us down around the Portuguese coast to the Mediterranean beaches of Spain, and then up through the mountains to the little hamlet country of Andorra before moving on to France, where we will meet up with a couple of long lost friends from Chile.

JessieAnne and Sergio ran the Cuerpo Orgulloso tattoo studio in Santiago, Chile for a number of years before packing it in and taking their show to France, where they settled in pretty comfortably. I have not seen them since the old South America travelling days, and I miss them dearly- they are truly good friends. I look forward to meeting up with them again. . . and taking away a few new tattoos.

I have never before undertaken a long distance bicycle journey, and I look forward to the new horizons that this could provide. The bicycle is the most energy efficient form of transportation in the world, and I think that it is about time that I try this new way of getting around the globe.
While travelling by bus or train you find that you can only really go from place to place on a map without experience much of the inbetween areas. Go, stop, go, stop, go, stop. Public transport travel is a divide and conquer way of wandering, and you are only offered small glimpses of the routes that you move upon. Now, I want to connect the dots on the map and travel complete paths, to experience these foreign lands in their totality. I want to feel every rock, every hill, and every rainstorm and sunny day. I want to feel the true distances that I travel, know what is in the blank places on maps, and find out how large the world really is.

And to do this all under my own power:

Enter the bicycle.

• Portugal
• Europe
• France
• Spain
• Bicycle Travel
• Europe Bicycling