Simply Cycling

Pearl-white snow and a torrent of hail and then dark.

We enter the tunnel. 

I feel it first in my lungs. A tightening, like air being sucked out of a paper bag. Like my airways are filling with something they shouldn't be. Something thick. Like I need a certain amount of oxygen to live and this just isn't enough oxygen to live.

Dead birds in the gutter. Fistfights in the street. Dust in the air and diesel exhaust in our lungs and white-hot lightning bolts forking down from dark grey stormclouds above. Our departure from Almaty—from our plush hotel room overlooking the park to this—has been an afternoon of the starkest contrasts.

It gets better. We escape Almaty's urban buffer and we enter the steppe. The traffic goes from horrendous to congested to actually quite manageable; the landscape from industrial wasteland to decent to rather pretty rolling hills. We can breathe again.

Cardboard. Scissors. Foam. Lots and lots of packing tape. Nuts and bolts and grease and grime. Papercuts and dirty fingernails. Two boxes. Two bicycles. One taxi. Several bridges and one long highway. One big airport with two security checkpoints. Two passengers, two tickets. One plane. Final-calls and jet engines and seats in the upright position. Eyes out the window. Minarets in the distance, minarets getting smaller, minarets disappearing beneath the clouds. Ten thousand feet. Twenty thousand feet. Thirty thousand feet.

I rub my tired, bleary eyes and peer out the window into the waking dawn. Kazakhstan.

We don't even want to go to Serbia. But here we are, enveloped by a dozen friendly Kosovars, deciding if the border officials over in Serbia will be kind enough to let us in.

We want to go to Macedonia. That is the plan. But this border, the one to Macedonia, the one right over this hill, is closed. The next best option, the way in via Serbia, is not closed. But it's closed to us because we entered Kosovo via Albania, and not via Serbia like the Serbian government insists. We are stuck in the thick agar of bureaucratic purgatory.

It is dark, and thus one thing is certain. Even if we can find a way out of eastern Kosovo, it will not be tonight.

Nine months. The last time we'd seen Lauren's parents was nine months ago—ten, almost—at the departures terminal of LAX. After a tearful goodbye those last days of June, we'd taken a flight back to Washington, said our farewells to some more loved ones, and packed a few final things. And then we'd flown to Africa.

Summer became autumn and autumn became winter. Winter became spring. We kept in touch, of course. Traveling the world right now, in 2018, is in most ways easier than ever before. For all the ills of modern technology, it can do some incredible things. Phone calls, in real time, from a remote tent in the Tanzanian plains to Bob and V in the outskirts of Los Angeles. Video calls from a roadside wifi spot. Communication, cheaply and easily and rather intimately.

But pixels can only go so far. Nine months is a long time. And so weeks ago, back in Muggia actually, Lauren's parents had agreed to join us in Montenegro at the end of April. And now it is the end of April. And now they're here, looking lovely and three-dimensional and with far fewer beige pixelated boxes affixed to their faces than WhatsApp's low-res videochat display would have us believe.

We have found ourselves a home for the next two weeks. A place of our very own, with a balcony and seaside views, in the little Croatian town of Makarska. We can be there in a day, but the place isn't available until the first of April. Four days from now.

And so we bike to the beach. We stock up on four days of food. I fill the jugs strapped to my fork with thirteen liters of water and we carry another ten liters in various bags and bottles attached to our frames and racks. We pedal up a great big hill and come to the secluded spot we'd found on Google's satellite maps a few days earlier.

Our secluded spot is way, way down below.