Carrying Less, Saying More: Granada to Lake Ohrid

I am writing this from a small flat in the old town of Ohrid, in North Macedonia, on my last evening here before I cross into Bulgaria. The lake is out the window. It has been six weeks and three days since I left home.

The last post ended in Granada. This one runs from there to here: Barcelona, Sardinia, Sicily, a long day down the length of Italy, a border in Albania that would not let me through, and finally this lake. Some of it is fresh. Some of it is already going soft at the edges, which is most of why I am writing it down.

The first leg was the plan falling apart. This one was slower. I spent a lot of it on my own, on the bike, thinking.

Barcelona, and the gear I stopped pretending I would use

After Granada I rode close to ten hours to a small town about half an hour short of Barcelona, where a family had turned a few of their rooms into Airbnbs. Anton and Manu, and their two kids, on a cliff over the sea. There was a beach down a hiking path, half an hour on foot, and the half hour was enough to put most people off, so it was as good as empty. In the mornings I walked down and swam there alone in cold, clear water. In the evenings I walked into town for tapas and watched people live their lives. One morning I had breakfast on the balcony with two other guests, Sebastian and Camila, from Chile, and we traded stories about where we were each going.

The trip is solo on paper and almost never in practice. The run-ins with people are the part I keep liking most.

It was here that I finally made a decision I had been avoiding for weeks. I stopped camping.

I had hauled a full camping kit across the continent and used it three nights in twenty-five days, two of them with Pete. There was a plain gap between the plan and the reality. In the plan there was a beautiful campsite at the end of the day. In the reality, at the end of a riding day, I just wanted a bed. I kept negotiating with myself: I already bought the thing, so I should use it. That is the sunk cost talking, and it is a bad reason to do anything. The money was already gone whether I carried the kit or not.

There was a practical side to it too. The bike carries seven bags, six once the camping gear was gone, and every one I could shed made the daily ritual of parking and unloading in a riding suit in the heat that much easier.

The same instinct was quietly changing how I move. I started this trip riding most days and sleeping somewhere new each night. Then two nights in a place. Now at least three, with five and seven coming up. Staying longer means seeing fewer places, and it took real effort to be okay with that. It also means I can settle, and it means I can work.

The thing I am building, and who it is for

Three nights somewhere is enough time to do real work in the hot afternoons. One night never was. And there is a reason I need the time.

Two things are sitting on top of each other right now. One is that I want to bring my kids on a trip like this. Next summer, maybe a camper van, or a rail pass and a loose plan, even a month or two of it. An old colleague said something to me once that I have not been able to put down. You only get eighteen summers with your kids, he said, what are you doing with this one. I want to give them a few summers they carry for the rest of their lives. Some of that, if I am honest, is that I did not have much of that kind of thing growing up, my circumstances were, let's call it "different". The other thing sitting there is the quiet math underneath the wish. The only way I get to do any of it is if my work allows it.

So I have been spending the afternoons building. For a while I was trying to make a few apps and products work, and there was always uncertainty hanging over them. Then it landed on me that I already know where the real demand is. A lot of companies know they have to do something with AI and have no idea what. That is my actual area of expertise. So I have turned most of my working time on this trip toward that, a consulting offer I am calling Six Week AI.

The pull is not really the business. It is the freedom. The thing I disliked most about my last year of work was the hours lost to meetings and aimless nonsense that went nowhere. I want a working life that bends around a trip like this, around my kids, around the days when the right move is to do nothing. If I can use these months to get a little traction, then maybe by the time I am back in the US in August there is something real beginning to take shape.

Sardinia, with Jessy

The ferry to Sardinia is eighteen hours. A month of gas-station sandwiches and no real exercise had caught up with me, and I had decided to start treating myself better, so on the morning of the crossing I went to the ship's gym.

There was one other person in there, all energy, impossible not to talk to. We ended up training together for almost two hours, laughing and swapping stories the whole time. Her name is Andreia, she is Portuguese, and her whole life is arranged around freedom in a way I noticed straight away. She works for a fancy restaurant in the US, and gets to pick a different branch to work in each summer. This was her second summer in Sardinia. As we finished, I said it would be good to meet up if she had a free day. She said she had been thinking the same. We swapped numbers.

I came off the ferry at Porto Torres and rode up to Santa Teresa Gallura, where Jessy had already arrived. I have known him over twenty years, and after weeks on my own I was glad to see him. Four good days. A boat around the La Maddalena archipelago, sixty euros with food included, which I still do not understand. A crossing to Corsica and a second boat out of Bonifacio to swim off the Lavezzi islands. A local beach I kept going back to, having apparently become a rent-an-umbrella kind of man. A small restaurant called Marlin out over the water. One day I put Jessy on the back of the bike down to Olbia, which is where I boxed up the camping gear and asked Jessy to take it back to London for me, the Barcelona decision finally made real.

Then Jessy left, and the day after was a strange one. A little sad, suddenly just me again. Dinner alone that night felt different from dinner with him. But there was a date on the calendar, and that is its own kind of fuel.

The thing I almost did not say

I rented a second helmet for the day so I could pick Andreia up on the bike. The guy at the rental place, Moto Paradiso, started laughing when I explained I wanted just a helmet - no bike. "Ah, your girlfriend." I said something like, yeah, something like that. He handed me a helmet on nothing but trust and told me to bring it back. So much of this trip runs on that, strangers handing you things and trusting you to return them. The helmet happened to be blue, which turned out to be her favorite color, and she loved that.

We spent the whole day together, eleven in the morning to eleven at night. She had spent a summer here before, so she knew the places she wanted to show me. Three or four beaches, cafes and bars in between, the kite surfers out on a windy afternoon. When it came to dinner she handed the choice back to me. Somewhere in all of it the conversation went deep, the way it sometimes does with a near-stranger you will only have for a day. Values. Past relationships. What we each want in the next one. By the evening there was a real attraction on my side, and I said none of it.

I told myself two things. That I did not want to make it awkward for either of us. And that the window was too small to matter anyway. So I dropped her back at her apartment, said I had enjoyed the day and hoped to see her in California, gave her a hug, and rode home with all of it sitting unsaid in my chest.

The way I think about integrity is the alignment between what is going on inside and how I show up on the outside. All day, those two things had not matched. I had been holding back, for what felt like good reasons, but holding back all the same.

Solo riding gives you long, quiet hours, and I spent that night and the next morning turning it over. At first I told it to myself as a story about her, about timing and awkwardness and how small the window was. Then the question turned around on me. What was I actually protecting? What would have happened if I had just said it? It stopped being about Andreia and started being about me. How many times have I wanted something and not had the courage to ask. A project at work I wanted and never put my hand up for. An interest in someone I never voiced. An outcome I was too afraid to request, so I told myself I had not really wanted it. Vulnerability is easy as an idea. It is a different thing at eleven at night, outside someone's apartment, with the engine still running.

So the next day I said it. I told her I had enjoyed my time with her, that for me there had been more to it than just hanging out, and that I appreciated her. That was all of it. And every outcome I had braced for failed to show up. She was not weirded out and did not go cold. She was flattered. She said something like, who knows, it could have gone anywhere, and made the whole thing light. Nothing I had been protecting myself from was real.

Before the ferry to Sicily I took my friend Jonathan's advice and rode across the island to Bosa for two slow days, mostly work, building out the offer. I liked Bosa, a faded, old-world little town. Then back to Cagliari for the crossing.

Sicily, and how curvy is enough

We pulled into Palermo at five in the morning. I had two things in my head going in, the stories about the mafia and how dangerous Sicily is supposed to be, neither of which survives an empty Palermo at dawn. Mostly it reminded me of Bombay, and I could not say exactly why. The sunrise coming in was about the only photo I took there. I got a coffee and rode on.

My first stop was Agrigento, three nights, reached by the long route along the west coast. I stopped at Erice, an old town high on a cliff, wrapped in cloud the day I went, beautiful and half asleep. I have been navigating with an app called Kurviger, built for motorcyclists, which offers you the interesting line instead of the fast one. Fastest, fast and curvy, curvy, and extra curvy. With all the time in the world, I chose extra curvy. I have since changed my mind. It put me on things that can barely be called roads, close to unrideable on a loaded GS. My friend Prashant has a line, that he will ride a road if it is motorable, and he would not have been happy with some of these.

On one of them the road gave out into loose rock on a steep pitch, a drop on one side, and I sat there with both feet down and a fully loaded bike I had no hope of lifting on my own, working out a line and fairly sure I was about to go over. I did not. But I was shaking a little at the bottom, and the view from the top had not been worth it.

That is the thing I keep running into. One more turn, one more town, one more tour, one more thing to see before I move on. I do not fully understand it yet, but it feels like a fear of missing out, a worry that the version of the trip I am not having is the better one. It is the same pull as the camping gear and the three nights. Choosing curvy over extra curvy, or three nights over two, or a place I could technically have reached and skipped anyway, is all me trying to stop measuring the trip by how much I can cram into it. It does not come naturally.

I walked a tour in Agrigento with a guide named Alessi, one of the best I have had. He called Sicily a lasagna, layered and mixed, ruled by empire after empire because it sits at the crossroads of everything. There is one photo I love, where he sets his foot on a worn step and tells you to picture everyone across the centuries who stood right there because it was always the easiest line to take. The temples around the town are extraordinary.

Somewhere on this leg I picked up a book called Rejection Proof, after a conversation, partly with Claude, where it got pointed out to me that putting myself out there is the exact thing I avoid. The cure in the book is not more introspection. It is the opposite. Go out and get rejected on purpose, over and over, until it loses its grip. It named the same pattern Andreia had just shown me: the LinkedIn post I do not write, the offer I hesitate to make, the day I almost did not say the thing. One fear in a lot of different coats.

Etna

I rode east to set up for the exit at Messina and to spend time around Mount Etna, and found an Airbnb outside Linguaglossa that was lovely and a little too isolated, which is where I worked out I should stop booking places this cut off. Etna is the reason to be there. The roads around it are worth riding, and I hiked up two or three times, each one a little different. The top is surreal, like the surface of the moon. The volcano burped once while I was there, which apparently it does often and is nothing to worry about, easier said than done.

The coast I skipped, and the road to the boat

Staying longer in fewer places had a price here, and the price was Naples and the Amalfi coast, which did not fit. I have made my peace with it. They are a trip of their own and I will come back for them, which is easier to say now that I am no longer trying to see everything at once.

I rode five hundred kilometers across mainland Italy to Bari, a port town on the Adriatic that, like a lot of southern Italy, reminded me of India: the lack of polish, a vegetable seller working out of a cart, the plain way people get on with things. Then a ferry across to Durres, in Albania.

The border that would not open

I had decided not to stop in Albania, to ride straight through to Lake Ohrid, but I did not want to skip the country entirely, so I rode a section of the Albanian leg of the Trans-European Trail. The scenery is some of the best of the whole trip, rugged passes and empty mountains. It is also, between the trail and the extra-curvy habit, where I once again chased more than was sensible. The track turned into sections that were close to impossible on a fully loaded bike. At one point I reached an old man and his wife who could not believe I was attempting it and tried hard to wave me back. We managed some sign language, I took a couple of photos with them, and I carried on against his advice.

I was riding down out of two grueling hours of this toward what my GPS said was the border with North Macedonia, hoping not to get a flat, with a half-remembered YouTube video about Albania being unsafe running in the back of my head. The border, when I reached it, was two guards smoking and drinking tea who looked like they had not seen anyone cross there in a long time. They were not going to let me through. The reason was simple and one I had not thought of. They had no computer system to check my passport, so they could not process me. They sent me back to the regular crossing, which meant a two-hour detour the way I had come and then further south. I tried to charm them. But the best they could offer was a cigarette and some tea.

Ohrid

Lake Ohrid is stunning. I have an Airbnb in the old town with secure parking and wifi so bad I have been tethering off my phone, which has been fine. Six weeks in, and I've made peace that a lot of times things just don't work - and that's ok. Almost expected. The food is a high point, fresh trout from the lake, Ohrid cake that is worth the trip on its own, and enough Greek influence that the salads are excellent.

On a walking tour I met Daniela and her grandson. Daniela is Croatian, somewhere in her seventies, fluent in English, and spent her career in the Croatian foreign ministry. She gave me the geopolitics of the Balkans in a way I could not have got anywhere else. When I asked why it is North Macedonia when there is no South, she said she would explain it the way a man having a coffee under a pine tree would, enough to get the whole picture without losing it in detail. She also walked me through Serbia and Kosovo, which I need to understand for my route home. I am hoping to see her and her family in Dubrovnik. Ohrid is also famous for its churches, supposedly 365 of them, one for each day of the year, which is absurd for a town this size.

What is next

Tomorrow I cross into Bulgaria. I'm going to the Bansko Nomad Fest, so I am staying about a week, the longest I will have stopped anywhere on this trip. A few weeks ago I would have found it impossible to sit still that long. After that the route bends back west and north, through the rest of the Balkans, with Dubrovnik and Daniela on it somewhere, and eventually the Alps. The next post will come from that road.

A few things I noticed

Three from this leg, written down so I do not lose them.

Enough is a real quantity. Extra curvy was worse than curvy. Three nights beat one. Skipping Amalfi made the rest of the trip better, not worse, and the Albanian trail that nearly stranded me was just me chasing one more notch past enough. The instinct to squeeze the last ounce out of an experience is usually the thing that spoils it. Learning to recognize enough is most of the skill.

Say the thing while it still costs something. Almost every time I have stayed quiet about what I wanted, the silence protected nothing. The awkwardness I feared was always cheaper than the regret. Andreia taught me that in a day, but the lesson is old and I keep having to relearn it, on the bike and on LinkedIn and everywhere else I go quiet.

The best things showed up when I stopped trying. Sebastian and Camila over breakfast. Two hours in a ship's gym that turned into Andreia. Daniela on a walking tour. A helmet handed over on trust. None of it was on any plan. It happened in the gaps, on the days I was just there, not optimizing, not chasing the next thing.

I am starting to wonder if carrying too much and saying too little are the same fear wearing different clothes. I will keep turning that over on the way to the Alps.

More soon.