In July, four of us rode our bikes from Czechia to Norway. Our journey more or less followed the route shown below. Prague, Dresden, Berlin, Copenhagen, Oslo, Bergen. We took a few ferries across vast seas, and — toward the end of the trip — we took a couple long train rides. All in all, we rode our bikes about a thousand miles.
Our crew was Wiley, age 15. Henry and Orion, ages 15 and 16. And me, the youngish dude on the right.
Recently, when I’ve traveled — and especially by bike — I’ve made a point of dropping into long conversations with strangers, and taking their portraits when they let me. Not this trip, though. The people of Czechia weren’t particularly interested in making eye contact with a tourist.
More to the point, I didn’t have the attention to engage deeply with strangers, my body maxed as it was by full days of biking, my mind filled with the antics, dramas, and endless jabbering of these hilarious bozos.
Of the places we traveled through, it was Denmark that thrilled me the most. There was humor in the landscape, a sense of style, a feeling of age & cultural depth that was real, but less preserved-in-amber than other touristy spots in Europe.
Some fellow travelers in Denmark.
Eating on a budget, the boys became experts at navigating discount European grocery stores. Lidl. Aldi. Rema 1000. I admired their very different approaches to choosing their meals. Henry ran the numbers — how could he get the most protein/calories for the fewest kroners? Wiley, infinitely practical, would find himself a pastry (for comfort) and something vaguely nutritious to wolf down. Meanwhile, Orion entered the store with a sort of magical ambience about him. What would he find this time? A new flavor of Pringle? Salmon pate? Caviar for $3 a jar? He tried all of these and many more, sometimes squinching his nose in disappointment when he finally got a taste (he tried to pass off the pate to the rest of us, but he ate a second jar of the caviar with potato chips). I admired their tenacity, but ultimately I had my own system — ice cream, chocolate croissants, butter keks.
On our first night in Berlin, within hours of our arrival, the boys met some Spanish exchange students. A tram ride was involved; some romance, too, at least for certain members of our party. I was impressed for sure, but also I was pissed. We’d pedaled 75 miles that day. I wanted to sleep. Instead I was drinking a beer alone in the hostel lobby, too tired to talk to anyone, waiting for the kids to text. This turned out to be the most challenging aspect of our entire trip: our divergent requirements for rest. Henry and Orion could go and go and go (and when they started to fizzle, a Red Bull would easily iron things out). Less so for Wiley, who needs his sleep. And me? All I wanted in the evenings was to shut the motherfuckers up. But I felt lucky, too, to be in the presence of their overstimulated teenage discoveries. Each new city held its specific wonders. The graffiti of Dresden. The canals of Copenhagen. Still, nothing compared to their first hours in Berlin, because how can anything every be as good as that?
