Time For Some Escapism

“One day you will wake up & there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve always wanted. Do it now.” – Paulo Coelho

In a couple of weeks I will be leaving for another new cycling adventure, this one called Olive Route. This tour originated with Michael, our Customer Service Manager, who one night had a dream and the next thing we knew, there was a plan for a new tour from Athens to Lisbon.

I don’t know if you like olives – I do – but on this trip I expect I could become a connoisseur of olives. I mean, I will be eating Greek, Italian, French, Spanish and finally Portuguese olives. While I will be enjoying North Mediterranean olives, our Operations Manager Miles, who cooked up the Road of Empires tour, will be sampling some of the best North African olives in Algeria and Tunisia, both of which are in the top ten of olive producing countries. After the tours we can compare notes.

These two new routes are a continuation of our company’s tradition of creating challenging and fun cycling tours. In the case of the Road of Empires Tour, as with the first Tour d’Afrique and Silk Route Expeditions, we are breaking new ground for cyclotourism. To our knowledge there are no other organized long distance cycling tours in Algeria and Tunisia.

On the road in Algeria

Challenging and fun? Well, Bruce Chatwin, who wrote a couple of good books on travel, once wrote “The word ‘travel’ is the same as the French travail. It means hard work, penance and finally a journey. There was an idea, particularly in the Middle Ages, that by going on pilgrimage, as Muslim pilgrims do, you were reinstating the original condition of man. The act of walking through a wilderness was thought to bring you back to God. That is something you find in all the religions.” Of course, on our cycling tours we are not walking because that would take way too long, and anyway, I think cycling is more fun.

If you are familiar with the New Yorker magazine you will be aware of – or at least of his cartoons – a very talented French illustrator by the name Jacques Sempe. Several of his illustrations had bicycles in them. And the reason for it was very simple. He drew what he saw. His obituary in the Economist mentioned some examples: “A middle-aged businessman kicked up fallen leaves in a park; an office worker, returning home, flicked the pedal of a drum kit. Another, smiling blissfully, rocked on a playground swing to contemplate the sunset. A plutocrat sat splashing in his villa’s private pool. Cyclists, the happiest of beings, raced down tracks together, brought cities alive with their colours and coasted solo above gridlocked traffic over the Brooklyn Bridge. At the edge of the gigantic sea, on a vast beach, a tiny figure in red shorts did a handstand for sheer joy.” Yes, we cyclists are the happiest of beings.

I could go on and write why cyclists are the happiest but poets and songwriters can do this better. Take this French song called ‘Nous Voyageons De Ville En Ville’. Here is an excerpt – with the help of Google translate:

We travel from town to town
Our tomorrows are uncertain
A blonde holds out her hand to you
It’s easy life again
One day here, one day there
Our life is like a romance
Soars to a tune of luck
Running from happiness to happiness
Preferring joy to unhappiness
Intelligence to stupidity
Frankness to hypocrisy
To the police, people of heart

We travel from party to party
They point at us
They call us the itinerants
Truly, we are poets
One day serious, one day laughing
Our life plays alternately
The tragedy of existence
And the comedy of happiness
Friends for life, for death

In my recent blog, Cycling in Stressful Times, I wrote that in challenging times, as we are all experiencing now, in order to maintain our calmness and happiness some escapism is in order. So that is what I am doing. I am escaping for two months and becoming an itinerant.

And if you, like me, are in need of some escapism, Michael recently wrote two helpful blogs, What’s on Tap in 2025  and What’s On Tap For 2026. We are running 13 tours in 2025, and I haven’t even counted how many countries we cycle in but I do know that in 2026 we are biking in 47 countries. I would say that is plenty of opportunity to escape for a while, be challenged and, most importantly, be happy.

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