Everyone keeps saying how jealous they are of our trip. First of all, so you should be – it’s awesome! But I also thought I’d do a bit of a tongue-in-cheek post of the things that aren’t always so great.
- We get lost a lot. And, when you’re on a bike, it can get very stressful, especially because Courtney is relying on me to navigate and sometimes it’s very difficult to communicate exactly which of several roads or which lane of a 6 lane split highway he needs to be on. Sometimes the Navman is wrong, sometimes it shows tiny gravel driveways as roads so ‘second left’ is actually the first and sometimes it loses us entirely when we drive down a new road and it thinks were in a paddock.
- We argue. Although, we’ve always argued because we are two very strong personalities and I actually think that considering we are basically together 24/7 here, we fight less. I think we’ve had 2 or 3 big ones in a month of travelling and while at the time we wonder if we’ll make it through the trip, they’re always over quickly enough and the rest of the time with each other is awesome.
- 99% of camping showers suck. Some are cold. Most you push a button to get water for 30 seconds, then it stops and you push it again and so on. One I was in stopped restarting after I had soaped up and I had to try and get to another cubicle to rinse off. We have microtowels which are awesome for getting dry and awesome for travelling but not so awesome for covering up for a nudey run. The best showers were in San Sebastian, super hot, super powerful and no time limit.
- It generally costs around $NZ25 to do our weekly laundry, after we pay for detergent, washing and drying. In Paris they didn’t tell us the dryer was for 10 minutes and due to the time at night when we realized, we had to cart wet clothes to Bordeaux and luckily we could dry them there.
- We can’t stand up in our house. AKA our tent. It seems silly but when we treated ourselves to a hotel room post San Sebastian (that post is coming) it was a huge novelty to stand up while getting dressed.
And of course we have thin mattresses, sometimes it rains, if we walk somewhere far away we have to walk all the way back, we don’t speak the language so ordering food sucks, and campers can be very noisy. But of course when it’s not raining it’s Summer, we get a new favourite food every week, we can pack up and go any time and we are seeing the world! Not a bad trade!
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