Tour de France. How did we get here?

Hey there wonderful people. Josh here checking in from a hostel in Nice. Ever heard of it? It's in France.

Well, the bike wheels keep rolling. We just completed a week of biking in France, after leaving our beloved Spain. We miss speaking Spanish, cause we don't speak a lick of French and feel foolish over here. However, the roads are better and the drivers a little more sane.

Recap: We farmed in Mallorca till March 1st. Man we really started to like that place. It had a certain charm that just gets you after a while. Binifela, the farm is called. Typical day: We woke, we worked, we hit the beach, we ate really good food, we lit the wood stove, and we called it a day. We will miss the chickens, cows, dogs, and our German pal Georg who runs the place. We learned a bit about responsible farming and how it's a legitimate way to be. We really got a chance to relax, and the weather was oh-so-nice. Two weeks total we farmed.

After taking the ferry back to the mainland, we hit up our buddy Xevi's house. Xevi is a real nice guy who spent some time in Tennessee, and we returned the favor with a visit to his place. He has what I would classify as a castle in Catalonia, which is in northeastern Spain. Well it's in spain on the map, but Xevi, a true modern day peaceful (at least i think so...) revolutionary, informed us that it is actually completely different from the rest of Spain. It has a different language, and Xevi says it will be independent within a year or two. Long live Catalonia! Anyway we got a chance to take a load off in a sweet house that is literally 1000 years old.

From there we took a short train ride without all of our junk into Barcelona, Spain's second largest city. We checked it out and it was fairly awesome. We spent two days and saw a lot of stuff including really nice architecture by the architect Gaudi. The most interesting building was the Sagrada Familia. You should google the pics. It is a church that has been under construction for over 100 years i think and still being built.

And the pickpocketers almost got me. We were coming up out of the subway, and I happened to have my wallet in my back pocket for some dumb reason, and then I got wierd vibes and noticed a couple guys following really close behind me. One dude made a move for my wallet, but I was paying attention and pushed his hand away. He then patted me on the shoulder a couple times, which I guess was some kind of distraction stunt for his buddies to try for it. But it didn't work so they scampered off and tried to act like they hadn't done anything. Anyway, thank God I got outta there just fine.

After Barcelona we knew it was time to hit the road. We set out and crossed the border into France. It felt like a cold slap to the face right when we got to France. We biked for three days, then it snowed on us camping out one night. We didn't sign up for that. So we biked a miserable bike ride out of that campsite through a major headwind to Sete, from which we decided to jump on a train to Marseille. Got to Marseille and got a hostel. Here I met my only other fellow Tennessean so far, a guy from Nashville. We also met a fellow Christian who just completed a trip to Uganda.

Marseille is the second largest city in France, and we liked it. It has a lot of history of course, like every city over here. The harbor is huge. We walked all over Marseille and left it begging for mercy. We could see the Chateau d'iff also off the coast. It's the famous French version of Alcatraz but way older. It and Marseille are also in the excellent film Count of Monte Cristo if you've seen it.

The weather has stayed cold ever since. Everybody here says it never ever gets this cold. I think warm weather is coming the next few days though. So next we head toward Italy. We are gonna bike into Monaco, a tiny really rich country right on the coast, just to say we've been. Then we bike to the first city across the Italian border.

Our plan from there is to hop on a train into Italy and by-pass the northern mountainous part. We have a couple reasons: cold, possibly snowy mountains and tunnels we have been warned to stay away from, time limit to get to Rome, and Zach's achilles tendon which has been acting up (I had the same thing pedicabbing in NYC, but it's not serious). We will then cruise right down through central Italy and tuscany to Rome, the final destination. It would be really expensive to get the bikes with us all the way back home, so we are contemplating selling them, which may be the hardest thing we have to do on this trip. Give up the old Schwinn World Sport, the best sport in the world? I may cry.

Bike life goes on. It gets old, then it gets awe-inspiring again, and every once in a while we stop and wonder how the heck we have made it this far and are surprised by how long we have been over here. We pass through so many towns that I forget towns altogether sometimes. I have spent a lot of time now with a good bro, Zach Dean. Do we ever get tired of each other. Yes. Well not too bad usually. Sometimes we have to argue over directions and places to camp. Actually the other day we both had to acknowledge that we were being arrogant and unpleasant dudes. Troop morale has improved since. Now we are looking to the future and seeing what the Lord has stored up for it.

We have been camping out a lot. In an abandoned building here, in the middle of nowhere there. When we get tired of camping we find a hostel, and most are usually pretty cheap, clean and have more character than a hotel. We recently camped right on the beach where a lot of US troops arrived in 1944 to cut through France to Austria. We were proud, so proud.

Spare time consists of playing cards, eating a lot, looking off into the distance, an occasional pipe smoke, and Bible reading. Cards? That would consist of one of three games depending on our mood: cribbage, golf or rummy. We try to play in the coolest places possible. Reading. I am currently reading a lot in the old testament, and just finished Daniel. He saw a lot of crazy visions. I am seeing the value of the OT and picking up on so much of the prophecy of the new covenant. It's crazy to see how all of history led up to it and now we live in it!

Well, I will try to post more often on here.

Okay, love and miss everybody. Au Revoir!

Leaving the Motherland

I realize I have not updated in a while. Yeah, sorry about that. It´s a lot of work to find a place to use internet long enough and actually sit down to relax and write down everything via a computer, but I have some time on my hands at the moment. I guess hardly anybody back home has any idea of what or how we are doing over here. Well we are still breathing and feeling fine. Irregular is our new regular, and abnormal is the new normal. That is how these kind of trips work I guess.

Well what can I say? Life in Spain goes on. Right now we are on the island of Mallorca, right smack in the Meditteranean Sea. We are woofing, which means we are again volunteering on an organic farm for about 10 days. This is a really awesome place. We just came from Valencia, Spain´s third largest city, from which we took a ferry to here. The last few weeks have been an adventure. I think the last thing I wrote about was getting to Cadiz, which is now only a distant memory in my mind. We have crossed most of the length of the country since then. Maybe I can give you a rough outline of the trip up until now for starters. There is so much we have experienced that it will really only be a few memories that stick out in my mind. However, words will have to do because I have given up on pictures for now. It never seems to work if I try to upload them on these wierdo computers.

The Early Days.
Way back when our trip was still young, we left our new friends from Cadiz and continued heading south. We biked for a couple days until we reached the southern tip of Spain at a little place called Tarifa. It was here that we had a sweet beach camp right on the Atlantic before having to say goodbye to it, as we would be passing by the Straight of Gibraltar the next day and entering the domain of ole Meddy (the Meditteranean). Here we jumped in the Atlantic at night, then slept under the stars. We know that we must also soon jump in the Med, which has not happened yet but is soon to come.

From there we crossed a huge mountain in the rain to Gibraltar. Gibraltar is actually a tiny sliver of land owned by England. This meant signs in English and people who spoke English, which was nice for our short two-day stay. Here there is a natural rock formation called the Rock of Gibraltar (aka Gibby). We hiked the rock and experienced an awesome view up top. It is pretty impressive enormo rock jutting up out of the Med. Google the pics. Here we also saw the barbaric wild apes that inhabit the rock unfenced and uncontrolled. Zach was actually attacked by one after he got too close to this one ape´s girlfriend for a picture. The ape went ape on Zach, ran down behind him and pulled his hair, and then Zach went ape on the ape. I saw the whole thing about to happen from a ways back, but for some reason couldn´t bring myself to warn him and decided just to watch. I got a kick out of it. Then the rain came, and it was pouring rain for two days. It was unbikeable, and we didn´t want to spend any more money in Gibraltar so we just decided to get cheat a little bit and get out by a cheap bus ride.

Thus began our portion of about two weeks without biking. We got to Malaga, then decided that we wanted to go to Granada, because everybody said it was the coolest town ever. It is inland a little ways and seperated from Malaga by the Sierra Nevada´s, Spains highest mountain range. We decided to save ourselves the trouble of biking through the mountains and cheated again by taking another bus to Granada. The buses are pretty cheap though fortunately, and we can get our bikes on them.

Granada chapter.
We stumbled upon a hostel in Granada while searching for a different hostel. It was called the Oasis Backpacker´s Hostel. It seemed pretty legitimate and had a lot of character, so we decided to stay and ended up being here three days. We experienced the hostal life here. Everybody makes friends within about two minutes of arrival, and hangs out with a bunch of strangers as if they had been friend for years. We experienced the the ancient palace-fortress of the Alhambra. It´s was a Moorish fort from the 13th century I think, and is Spain´s most popular attraction supposedly. Pretty amazing. We lived on tapas for three days, which are free portions of food served with every drink at every restaurant in Granada. Granada is beautiful and right at the foot of the tallest mountain in Spain. We got to climb an ancient wall above the city and take it all in. We threw a 25th birthday party for a hostal friend we met--a bunch of people and some wine with the Alhambra in the background one night. We went and saw a traditional flamenco singing and dancing act and shouted ole´ with all the locals.

Farm in the Sierra Nevadas.
Next it was off to our first woof farm. The farm is just south of Granada in the Sierra Nevada mountains. This was a great experience. The owners were a British couple, retired with a sweet plot of hilly land dotted with olive trees and really old rock wall terraces. We worked with two other woofers--David, 28, and Anne-Mary, 53. We all had a simple task--pick olives. It was extremely satisfying actually, and I now have a new appreciation for olives and even bought a bottle of olive oil to pour on my bread for the road. We climbed trees and nabbed olives for six days. Part of the woof deal is for your host to feed you, and oh did they. We ate so good and tried to store up fat reserves for the next week of biking. This was our longest time to sleep in one bed for the entire trip. Very good time.

On the Bikes Again.
We had rested long enough by this time and were ready to get back on the bikes. We set out to make it to Valencia over the next six days straight, about 650 kilometers away. We biked along the coast and even had a couple really warm days, in which we were sporting the shorts and tanks. Much of it was premium coastal biking with mountains on the left and the Med on the right. We camped every night wherever we found a secluded spot, except one hostal in Alicante. We enjoyed the nice long days of biking from sun-up to sun-down, but the weather had a surprise for us.

Cold and Rainy.
Then it got cold our last couple days. Then it started raining. Biking in the cold rain is fairly miserable and not worth it. At one point we jumped on a bus for about 30 kilometers to get out of the rain. It took us to Gandia where we had a contact, an acquaintance of Zach´s. It was here in this stupid town that we got lost multiple times in the cold rain at night. We reached the town in the dark and tried to find Zach´s friend. Long story short, we couldn´t find her or a phone to call her or a hostal or internet. At about 1230 am we were under an awning in the sketchy part of town out of ideas, cold, wet, and just staring into the dark rain. I think I said quietly, "well i think we may have reached our lowest point." Zach, "yep." We then just decided to forget our contact and get outta town, so we biked out of town in the dark on the world´s worst road planning to set up the tent in the rain somewhere. The night was saved when Zach´s back wheel screwed up and we stopped to fix it. It was then that we looked over into a construction zone beside the highway and saw a huge cement drainage device of some kind waiting to be put in the ground, which we would have not seen if we didn´t have to stop. Turns out, it was a good spot to camp inside the 4 x 5 cement tunnel. So we just climbed in and were happy to get out of the rain. We were just glad to be out of the rain and thankful for a place to stay. Thank God. We are actually glad for the experience, and now a little closer to knowing the life of a homeless person.

Leaving the Motherland
After this the weather got better and we cruised into Valencia. We stayed one day, and didn´t even really care about touring the city, as touring cities gets old after a while. We did meet our first other touring cyclist that we have even seen, however. She was a French woman named Danielle, maybe 50, who had been biking for two years. We exchanged bike talk and advice, as we were traveling in opposite directions to where the other had already been. We also realized that we are not that tough or cool to be doing this, cause older French women make us look bad. Oh well.

We got on the ferry, to Mallorca, biked across it, and are now organic farming at one of the world´s coolest farms owned by a German named Georg. Our tasks include gathering all kinds of veggies, feeding chickens, walking cows to different pastures, shoveling crap, building a rock wall, building a compost pile, and general cool farm stuff. We love it. The food is authentic and delish. The farm buildings are real old with a lot of character, and our room is awesome, complete with wood stove. Georg speaks English but speaks to us in Spanish most of the time to help us improve, which we have fun with. Now were are here for another 8 days, then it´s back to biking and hopefully reaching Rome in a few weeks!

A few things I am learning.
Well this kind of trip is interesting. We run into all kinds of people who think all kinds of stuff. Nice people, wierd people and all kind of other people. Is that specific enough? Well most people are actually happy and love life. So sometimes we have been wondering what makes us any different from unbelievers. Well I think I am learning that you can only be so happy without God. We run into people who are happy with their lives, but I think they can´t go any higher once they reach a certain point. I have been reading in Corinthians and learning how the wisdom of the world is foolishness to God and vice versa. However, it says we have all things given to us and can understand the qualities of God since we have the Spirit. It even says we are keepers of the mysteries of God. That´s pretty fantastic.

So we try to just love people we meet and maybe break some of the Christian stereotypes as we run into all these people for a short time. Hopefully our lives have some kind of authenticity that shows through to other people.

Otherwise I am just trying to practice reading the Bible for what it is, and spend time in the Word. That is interesting as well

We are learning how to live as vagabonds i guess. It´s fun.

Okay, I am getting tired of writing and I hope you made it to the end of this post, which is probly the longest i have ever written.

tchao portugal. hola espana.

Well, right now we are in Gibraltar, gateway to the Straight of Gibby (gibraltar). It is actually a tiny part of England. Signs are in English and the people speak English, so it is a major relief to know what's going on for a change. Two days ago we were in cadiz, spain, the claimed oldest city in europe. We finally said goodbye to Lisbon almost two weeks ago. It was a great time. We stayed there 5 days. Three with friends of our friend April Frankamp (below) and two in downtown with some friend we met from a great church we visited. It is an incredible town.

Finally, we took off from Lisbon in the pouring rain. It has been unusually rainy here at this particular time. We biked for 4 days in at least a half day of rain. The last week has been nice but now it is back to rain in Gibraltar.

So far only a couple things have broken. I had 1 flat, and we got lost multiple times. I am constantly surrounded by people arguing unintelligibly over which way I should go after asking directions. Life is interesting. I wish I spoke this blessed language.

Our sleeping arrangements have been interesting to say the least. One night in some random olive grove, 1 night under a school pavillion. 1 night in flat farmland on a concrete bridge. 1 night on the beach by the Straight of Gibby, with views of Morrocco across the water. We stayed with couch surfers in Cadiz 3 nights. Couch surger 2 nights in Tavira. 2 youth hostels. 1 other hostel. 1 hotel. We have only paid to sleep 4 times though out of 17 nights, which I think is pretty good.

We stayed in Cadiz three nights and managed to meet several friends, including a few Americans. We got a full Cadiz tour by our new friend Erin, from Oregon. We stayed in a nice flat in the old portion of Cadiz with some great young folk like ourselves. Two Italians and a German. Very nice people. We have just recently begun to expereince the Spanish lifestyle. In Rota, Ponce de Leon's hometown, we met up with two guys (friends of mi amigo casey stewart) and they introduced us to the Spanish cuisine. Siesta is every afternoon. Everything shuts down between 2 and 6. These people stay out late, young and old! Let me introduce you to a couple pics. I have many more but can't seem to find a dang computer good enough to upload any more. These are only through our first 5 days. Will try to get more up soon.

These are the people we stayed with for three days. We felt part of the family. Great, hospitable people.

Finally bicycles ready to go by end of day 3

Finally made it to the cool, blue Atlantic

Lisbon at night

Well, tchao for now. I love and miss all of you who may have bothered to read this. I am good; we are good; life is good. We're learning how to live as vagabonds I guess. It's fun, it's challenging, and we are gonna learn a thing or two from this whole crazy ordeal.

lisbon

Welcome to this blog. I and my pal Zach Dean are in Lisbon Portugal at the moment. We want to bike to Italy from here. I have no idea how this will all work out, but jump on board and follow this emotional roller coaster if you like....

Plans so far (or lack thereof)

ride our bicycles, go to Italy, put the prefix "euro" before every euro-word we euro-say, learn from the Big Man Upstairs, have fun, see culture, see history, not take showers, pummel Zach Dean regularly, then say sorry, then re-pummel, play pranks on Zach Dean, hug Zach Dean, good game Zach Dean, have pipe smokes in cool spots, play hack in cool spots, play music in cool spots, get leg muscles disproportionately larger than upper bod, meet euro-people, not have a phone or computer, summit tall things, have an irrational love for our bike mascots (mounted on handlebars), find euro-wives, become experts at jimmy-rigging, grow euro-stache, be legit people, follow the meditteranean coast, camp out, couch surf, hostel it up, sample delicious beers and coffees, be good travellers, and much much more...

photos and more info to follow soon...