I rented another AirBnB apartment in Dubrovnik just outside the Old City overlooking the ocean. I looked into shipping options for sending my bicycle back to the U.S., but after about a day in Dubrovnik the sun came out. Dubrovnik was beautiful and inspiring to see.
I did a short 3 mile ride in the rain when I got there from the bus station to my apartment and it wasn’t so bad with the new rain gear I bought. I had no excuses other than feeling uninspired to ride. That feeling was a totally valid reason to stop there, especially since I’d been working on living more authentically with this whole trip. I realized I had proper clothing for the winter weather. I realized that one unconscious requirement I had been making for myself this whole tour was that I always needed to ride “hard.” I felt the need to go multiple long days at a good-fast pace. I needed to prove to people that I was strong.
After meeting fellow travelers on the road and slowing down a bit, I realized that it was pretty pointless to prove how strong I was in comparison to how it felt to connect with people on the road. I’m on a bike TOUR, not a bike RACE. What was I doing? I inherited this habit from the USA trip I did last Spring when there was tremendous pressure to make daily miles in order to complete the trip within the allowed vacation days I had. I suppose another reason I was trying to cover so many miles per day while I in the Schengen zone was so that I could cover more countries and get out before I ran over my 90-day travel visa, which I did only by one day. Anyway, in Dubrovnik I got over my travel depression and decided there wasn’t any shame in going slower and spending more time in the Balkans compared to the pace I was doing in Western Europe. I decided to keep going to Istanbul.
Me looking shameful on the stairs from the “Shame” episode of Game Of Thrones (which had a lot of scenes shot here in Dubrovnik!)
I met up again with Jessica in Dubrovnik and she helped me connect with another expat meetup group she was connected with. I went out with them one night and had a blast. I met some people who were living the digital nomad life. One of them was a fellow programmer named Jason from Canada who had been doing “slow travel” around the Balkans since Covid started. He was friend material to me. Sharp and acerbic with a confident sense of adventure. I hope to come back and meet up with him some time in the future. That also just made me realize one of the significant drawbacks with traveling is that it’s very difficult to make pure friendships. There are fewer constraints and you meet people you wouldn’t normally get to. There’s just so much utility and not enough time in the equation when meeting people on the road that it’s difficult for me not to question the virtue of the friendship. When I travel this long, I feel vulnerable, often lonely. I never really felt lonely when I lived in SF. If anything, I frequently needed to find personal alone time. I’m not used to having this many transient friends collected when traveling. It will be interesting to see what happens once I’m back in a non-travel lifestyle.