World wide in The Netherlands

When you travel and work internationally, even in your home the world comes to you it appears. A comforting thought. Since we returned from our travels we have been able to rekindle many business relations and friendships across the globe through skype, e-mail and phone. And sometimes the travel just comes to you. On our journey from Russia to Australia we produced our own power by biking through the Busch& Muller e-werk. This led to an inspiring meeting with fellow cyclists this weekend.

Dick and Trudy will be off on 1 February. They are about 50, have two grown up daughters, they said goodbye to their work and their own company and sold their house to start living on two bicycles for a year. We discussed the practicalities of the e-werk apparatus, but also the more mundain topics of how as a woman you can go at any time any place when you really need to. Stuff that hardly anybody talks about as it is not sexy and probably does not contribute to inspiring travel enthusiasm. However, as always: practicalities like these can either seriously enhance or taint the on the road experience :-)

For us their visit tuned into our good memories. Moreover it is hugely inspiring to talk to people who are equally passionate. The lure of hard core travel, of discovering for yourself what you are made of and what the peoples of the world are made of, a desire to travel and to explore that it is so intense that at some stage(s) of your life you are willing to give up everything you have worked for, everything you have acquired and fought for to chase that one dream, is quite hard to explain to some. Most people end up making a choice: staying at home, dreaming of going but eventually never leaving, or going never succeeding in making a home again eventually loosing all sense of belonging, all sense of anchor in this world, becoming eternal nomads living from small job to small job. Both entail a loss of essential freedom and an even more essential loss of self we feel. So we set out to have both: to travel AND to work on a professional level, against the odds even both establishing a proper career true to our training and ambitions. All it takes it that we work a bit harder. But that has never killed anybody and I actually quite enjoy it. Every step gives meaning to and lays the groundwork for another step.

We thoroughly enjoyed meeting these kindred spirits, who at their age - when most have firmly settled -give up everything, trustig themselves, their own magnetic north, the future and the part of the world they are going to explore.  We wish them the very best of luck, an inspiring journey and a meeting of minds and hearts with whoever crosses their path. As always, may the road rise to meet them.