January 18, 2026
Rigours and Rewards of the Road
Day 45. Nadya and I have been pedalling west for a month and a half now and clocked about 1500 kilometres. We typically do 60 or 70 kilometres a day, which takes 5 or 6 hours depending on terrain (i.e. how many nasty hills there are!) and weather. We are soon to leave "The Boot" of Italy for Sicily, having cycled down the Ionian coast. Temperatures have been between 5 and 15 degrees Celsius.
It has taken us a while to metamorphose, to let go of our anchored routines and embrace life on the saddle with its headwinds, rain, and roaring traffic. We have red faces, achey legs, cracked lips, and stiff shoulders. Our eyes scan the ground constantly for sunken drains and broken glass. Naturally, our appetites have soared. We drop by grocery stores daily and devour bananas, salty peanuts, biscuits, and pastries like their going out of fashion.
It sometimes seems, as car after car flies past, that we're travelling in a way that is painfully slow and laborious, even outdated (pushing pedals to propel yourself??), making the journey harder than it need be. Yet, you realize at the end of the day how much you saw, heard, smelt, and felt that you wouldn't have had you been travelling by car. Today, we noticed how Bermuda Buttercups, the yellow wildflowers that bloom in roadside ditches in Calabria, close when it rains and open when the sun shines. Conscious of a mewing presence over our heads as we round a headland, we pause to train our binoculars on a pair of Common Buzzards, the undersides of their wings a delicate mosaic of white and browns.
As British long-distance cyclist Kate Rawles says, reflecting on the differences between car and bicycle travel, "On a bike, you are really IN the landscape" ('The Carbon Cycle,' 2012).
Tony
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