Day 6 – Meeting with St. Rupert

Yesterday’s evening rain in the heart of the Alps announced that today could be a challenge with the weather. Indeed, since early morning, the water was pouring in streams and after driving through a tunnel that was several kilometers long, a steep descent on the road awaited me. From experience, I knew that such a descent would end with a considerable hypothermia of the body and for the next 110 km to Salzburg I would be shivering with cold. So I sat at the train station on the other side of the tunnel and delayed my further ride thinking what to do.

And so I asked my Guardian Angel in the form of a random driver, Rupert, who not only drove me through the worst part of the downpour but also took me to the local attraction in Bad Gastein, the amazing waterfall. From today on, I will add St. Rupert, who is also supposedly the patron saint of Salzburg, to my short daily Litany of Saints.

Day 8 – A Tale of Two Alexandras/Aleksandras

I spent my last night in the charming Schloss Hotel in Passau. A bit of luxury after another day of pedaling in various weather conditions tastes especially good. The hotel is not only interestingly located at the confluence of three rivers, has interesting architecture but above all is run by wonderful people led by the owner Alexandra and her right hand, Eva.. At the end of my stay Alexandra asked me for links to videos from my trip. Unfortunately, due to my inadvertence, I sent them to some other Aleksandra (spelled with K as is popular in Poland), who was in my WhatsApp contacts. To my surprise, I almost immediately received a rather brusque message from this other Aleksandra (I don’t know how it ended up in my contacts) that she had received some suspicious links from me. Okay… I thought and then I saw that I had sent the links to the wrong address. In any case, I apologized to the Lady for the „morning spam” and wished her a nice day and deleted the contact so as not to make similar mistakes in the future. What moral do I see in this, apart from the obvious one, to double check who and what you are sending…

In life, we meet various „Alexandras”. What’s more, we ourselves, and I know this from myself, can be nice or judge someone too quickly. Today it was Ms. Aleksandra, another time it will be me or one of the readers of this story. It is worth holding back at such a moment and not making hasty judgments, because it often cuts us off from building relationships with others.

On my journey, I have already met many wonderful people. The simple key to this was a smile, an open attitude, sometimes a request for help… contrary to what the media tries to force into our heads, the world is full of wonderful people. I have no doubt that the second Aleksandra is also one of them.

Day 9 – Food is on the street – free! Yesterday, while cycling through the Bohemia region in the Czech Republic, I was struck by how many apple trees there were along the roads I was riding. It is now the season when these trees are bent under the weight of fruit, and many of them are already lying in the grass. Only here and there I saw people with crates collecting these stray apples. I suspect most of these fruits will simply rot. It reminds me a lot of situations in Poland with wild plums, e.g. Mirabelle plums. Rarely anyone collects them. The compote made by my wife Ania is wonderful! A reflection occurred to me that, in our various existential fears, we are often afraid that we might run out of money in life and therefore be doomed to hunger. I think that this is largely a justified fear resulting from the history of the human race, which has repeatedly experienced hunger, wars, etc. Looking at these free apples on the earth, a positive thought about the abundance of this world and gratitude for these God’s gifts appeared in my head. . I recommend apples. Not only Czech or Polish ones. The ones that taste best are those raised straight from the ground.

Day 10 – The difficult art of letting go

Many of you who have accompanied me on this bike journey from Zadar, Croatia to Wroclaw, Poland, in recent days have expressed your admiration for the physical aspect of this undertaking. For many non-athletes, cycling over 1100 km in 9 days, while climbing Mt. Everest and Mt. Blanc, may seem like a superhuman effort. Fortunately, this is not the case for me, as I have been doing endurance sports for many years. However, I have another challenge that I have been facing for years, and which was one of the main themes of this journey.

It is about unlearning the rushed life, at high speeds and with great intensity, which I have practically known for forever. Instead, I am learning to live more in harmony with nature, with the environment, with myself.

A few years ago, I withdrew from my professional life, which, in theory, created space in my life to develop these new habits. Being „here and now”, noticing what’s around you, being more open to others, better understanding yourself, your various emotions, your life path and the meaning of existence. Cycling through various unknown places, dragging not only a bike but also luggage and a drone on your back, somehow forces you to ride a slightly different style.

During this multi-day ride, I often watched as my old „I” bantered with the new one. The old one sometimes wanted to ride faster, further, longer. The new one asked him: but why do you want to hurry? Your wife told you that you can come back even next Sunday, and if necessary, even later. A wife like that is a treasure, isn’t she.

I stopped many times to admire something while many cyclists, especially on the Alpe Adria route, rode without noticing the beauty of the waterfalls, flowers, ripe grapes in Italian or Austrian vineyards, or the changing smell of our beautiful continent along the way. I used to rush like that without restraint. Before setting off on my journey, I wondered whether to take a drone with me. It’s an additional piece of junk to pack and carry, and each time it’s launched, it takes time, focus and preparation. Wanting to share my visual experiences with you, I tried to document this journey quite richly with photographs, both from a drone and from my phone. Anyone who has ever taken a photo while riding a bike, sometimes fast, knows that this requires extra effort. At the end of the day, it all had to be somehow edited into some digestible travel vlog. This additional work, although tedious, gave me a lot of satisfaction when it could move, inspire or lift the spirits of another person. As the wonderful priest Grzywocz once said, „value likes to be shared”. And what I experienced on many levels, spiritual, tourist, social, climatic, etc., was truly valuable.

I am writing this a bit in the past tense, so you can probably guess where my last story from this bike trip across Europe is headed. This morning, when I saw the downpour in Prague and the terrible forecast for the remaining 300 km of the road, my two “I’s” started to talk again. No, I have to go and finish this ride like a man, like a warrior… despite the terrible weather, despite my main assumption for this trip, which I wrote about above, and in fact despite myself. A new voice, you might say the voice of reason, said: but what pleasure will it be to spend another dozen or so hours on a bike in the pouring rain riding against a headwind of 30 km/h. What good will it do to the world? You don’t have to prove anything to yourself. And… I listened to this new voice, even though the old one wouldn’t let up. After leaving the hotel in Prague, I went to the train station in Prague to buy a ticket to Wrocław. It turned out that I could only buy a ticket at the ticket office to the Czech/Polish border in Trutnov. So I did. On the way, however, I returned to the idea that I could somehow crawl my bike from the border to Wrocław. After reaching Trutnov, it turned out that the downpour was so merciless that after a few minutes on the platform I was completely soaked. So I bought another ticket to the Sędzisław station, where I had two options: either stop for the night and continue the last 110 km by bike on Saturday or take another train, this time to Wrocław. I was about to book accommodation on in Sędzisław when I got the idea to check if there was anything to eat nearby. And nothing. I would have to starve for almost the entire day.

Of all the challenges that stood in my way, this last one turned out to be the hardest. How can I let go in this objectively difficult situation?! The goal is so close! For many people, especially those working in business, in professions that require high intensity, letting go is extremely difficult. One of the famous Polish Ironman competitors promoted himself with a slogan that once seemed quite inspiring to me, but today sounds idiotic to me, i.e. „There is no such thing as I can’t”.

When I was sitting there first in the restaurant car of the train to Wrocław and then chatting with fellow passengers about this and that, in the background there were voices of passengers saying that the terrible weather was because today was Friday the 13th. That it was all because of the Genoese Cyclone, Boris. I smiled internally because I felt that it was not Boris or the weather that defeated me, but that I defeated the old „I”.