....How did the three decisions turn-out? Do you eat meat, use cutlery, and/or use chairs today?
For me it was a motorcycle. I didn’t want to Interrail because, even though I adore the railway as an institution, I didn’t like the idea of being a passenger and being passively being carried to different places without somehow “achieving them” by my own hand (I realise this is an absurd and ridiculous decision… not a reasonable and sensible decision like refusing to sit in chairs...)
So, I loaded-up my ER5 (an objectively boring, mundane, unsexy motorcycle—but a faithful and trusty steed, to me!) and took the ferry to Dieppe with a hand-written list of directions worked out from paper maps and sellotaped to my left arm, and to the bag strapped to my petrol tank (I think Android OS had only-just been released but, if it had, it certainly hadn’t yet made its way down the economic food-chain to the likes of me..) My theory was that enough sellotape, being plastic, would waterproof the paper. It partially worked!
I only got as far as exploring parts of France and Belgium, and later a fair amount of Britain. (I always wanted to ride along the Zeeland-Holland coast: there are some long bridges and viaducts there that, even on large-scale paper maps, really stood-out as something unusual. Teenage-me imagined myself riding over them, no land on either side, no scenery, no visual distractions, just self + bike + road. It sounded amazing! But I never got that far. Perhaps someday I shall go back..)
Along the way I had some amazing experiences that I still often think about even today, saw many fascinating things I didn’t even know existed (I’d never really been to another country before, except as a small child who didn’t really notice anything beyond the superficial), met some really wonderful, interesting, and kind people, exposed myself to ludicrous amounts of unnecessary risk, challenged myself (physically, intellectually, spiritually -by which I mean ‘l’Espirit Humain’, not as in ‘religiously’- and in my ability to pilot, navigate, and maintain a motorcycle under adverse conditions), learned loads -through comparison- about my home country, and learned a fair bit about myself.
These days I mostly just ride my motorcycle (no longer an ER5, thankfully—but also sadly..) to work, to the supermarket, etc. - but I still have a relationship with it, in a way most people don’t seem to with most machines, and I think that those tours I did, two decades ago, are part of the reason why.
Great read. Thanks for sharing!
....How did the three decisions turn-out? Do you eat meat, use cutlery, and/or use chairs today?
For me it was a motorcycle. I didn’t want to Interrail because, even though I adore the railway as an institution, I didn’t like the idea of being a passenger and being passively being carried to different places without somehow “achieving them” by my own hand (I realise this is an absurd and ridiculous decision… not a reasonable and sensible decision like refusing to sit in chairs...)
So, I loaded-up my ER5 (an objectively boring, mundane, unsexy motorcycle—but a faithful and trusty steed, to me!) and took the ferry to Dieppe with a hand-written list of directions worked out from paper maps and sellotaped to my left arm, and to the bag strapped to my petrol tank (I think Android OS had only-just been released but, if it had, it certainly hadn’t yet made its way down the economic food-chain to the likes of me..) My theory was that enough sellotape, being plastic, would waterproof the paper. It partially worked!
I only got as far as exploring parts of France and Belgium, and later a fair amount of Britain. (I always wanted to ride along the Zeeland-Holland coast: there are some long bridges and viaducts there that, even on large-scale paper maps, really stood-out as something unusual. Teenage-me imagined myself riding over them, no land on either side, no scenery, no visual distractions, just self + bike + road. It sounded amazing! But I never got that far. Perhaps someday I shall go back..)
Along the way I had some amazing experiences that I still often think about even today, saw many fascinating things I didn’t even know existed (I’d never really been to another country before, except as a small child who didn’t really notice anything beyond the superficial), met some really wonderful, interesting, and kind people, exposed myself to ludicrous amounts of unnecessary risk, challenged myself (physically, intellectually, spiritually -by which I mean ‘l’Espirit Humain’, not as in ‘religiously’- and in my ability to pilot, navigate, and maintain a motorcycle under adverse conditions), learned loads -through comparison- about my home country, and learned a fair bit about myself.
These days I mostly just ride my motorcycle (no longer an ER5, thankfully—but also sadly..) to work, to the supermarket, etc. - but I still have a relationship with it, in a way most people don’t seem to with most machines, and I think that those tours I did, two decades ago, are part of the reason why.