This year in England has felt long — especially the last few months — and we've still got another winter to survive before we start cycling around the world.
When we arrived in Manchester last June, the plan was to stick it out for a year. But despite the daily grind, we decided to push it a few months further.
Last month Ilze went to Latvia; next week we're off to Spain; in September we'll cycle around Scotland; and in between there'll be the odd escape, like the trip to a friend's cabin in the middle of the North York Moors National Park, by the sea.
Doesn't sound so bad, does it? And we're saving a lot — every extra month in England buys us another six months of cycling the world… so it's worth the effort.
A Mexican colleague recently visited her family and showed me some photos, which got me thinking about the Americas leg of our world cycle route. In theory that stretch is still a long way off, so we'd never really stopped to think about it.
We want to go from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego: ride the west coast of the United States and zigzag across Latin America, pedalling across the Salar de Uyuni and on to the vastness of Patagonia. We haven't figured out how we'd cross Colombia, whether we'd visit Santiago de Chile or head more towards Buenos Aires, whether Machu Picchu would be on the route or if it might be a good idea to stay somewhere comfortable in Querétaro for a rest from all the camping.
Photos from elpedalero.
Thinking it through, we started wondering whether to start travelling in the middle of winter; instead of beginning in Europe and heading towards China, we could fly to South America and start in the southern hemisphere. That way we'd skip a winter — the same trick we pulled when we went to Southeast Asia in autumn 2011.
Nothing's decided, we haven't thought through any routes in South America — but it's there as an option if the wait until next spring starts to feel too long.
