Paul and Siona's travels

Back in the early 2000s, before Paul and I were married, we took our first cycle trip together. In an effort to make this easy on me Paul had booked an exorbitant expensive two week trip down the Danube. I’m embarrassed now by how pampered it was. There was a minibus to
take your gear to the next luxury hotel, so no worrying about what to take and how it would fit in and each night an included 3 course meal in some of the nicest scenery in the country and I still found it really, really tough, fully bursting into tears on a couple of memorable (and
embarrassing) occasions. Overall though, I loved it – being somewhere new everyday – seeing the surroundings at an unhurried pace and the feeling of achievement of just getting somewhere under your own
steam.
In the years that followed Paul and I went on many more long cycle trips, supporting ourselves and camping to be more independent (and therefore avoid bankruptcy). We travelled from the North Sea to the Med, another time Copenhagen to Vienna and lots of others we even went on a trip across Hokkaido (during which everything went wrong and is now in my head as the trip across hell-kaiddo).
So of course the whole time we talked about taking it one step further and doing “the big one” where we would take time off and do some really long trips. The US was earmarked early on as somewhere we could never do in any depth if we were working as it is just too
bloody big. We talked about it a lot and then after being in lockdown in Thailand for 18 months we finally decided to go for it.

We’re probably not really your typical cycle tourists. Although we’re both keen readers of blogs and books about people doing incredibly tough, amazingly challenging round-the-world trips, and have the utmost respect for how tough these guys are, you won’t find us doing 100 mile days through the deserts of the ‘Stans on a dirt track and sleeping on some local’s floor in a yurt. You certainly won’t find us trying to do it on $5 a day and sleeping in a hedge at the side of the road (well, maybe on the odd occasion if there is no other option!) We like to camp whenever we can, but are equally happy to find a cheap hotel for the night (especially if it’s cold and/or raining!) Anything more than 50km is “a long day” for us – It really all is about travelling slowly, seeing new places, meeting a few “interesting” people along the way and stopping for at least a couple of cups of coffee.