So, okay, this is a bit late in the day as the book was launched AGES ago. But, we haven’t really been in a place that we can do website work. Our chapter in the Big Book of Yes gives a fairly concise (and sometimes, hopefully, humorous!!) overview of our first 7 months on the road….with a bit of pre-prep stuff thrown in for good measure.

You can buy it on kindle here.

And in paper here.

AND, all the proceeds go to the amazing Teddington Trust (find out more about them here)

Not convinced??? Here’s the first 500 words…

“Oh my god Konstantin….” I screamed, gripping the steering wheel of our beloved fire truck in terror. “What the hell do I do?”.

The back end was swinging out of control. Konstantin had no time to reply. The van began spinning violently on the ice rink of a road. Once. Twic e. Three times. Round and round. There was nothing I could do but hold desperately onto the steering wheel.

~

The Beginning

Six years before, I’d dramatically bowed out of a job I hated (you know what they say about not burning bridges, well, erm, no-one gave me that memo). It was my first job out of university and I had innocently believed that this was it, this was my career. A year of slogging away for terrible pay and I’d had enough. My poor friend Chris had to bare the brunt of a “feck this shit” phone call one afternoon in May, where I dramatically declared “sod this, I’m coming cycling”. I had decided to say YES to his facebook event – a trip cycling from Munich to the Black Sea along the Danube. Poor Chris didn’t really have much choice in the matter.

And so, in June 2011, a motley crew of six assembled in Munich. We were a hodgepodge of creaking bikes, inexperience and particularly naive optimism. Not least, firstly, that we could buy any food in Germany on a Sunday. And, secondly, that the six of us could fit in Chris’s friend Konstantin’s ridiculously small studio flat. We squashed in, hungry, and started to really get to know one another.

I’m not going to lie, Konstantin had made an impression. His mop of curls ticked a major (I’ll admit, very shallow) box for me. Any potential father of my children must have curly hair to give the child the biggest possible chance of inheriting the Lockenkopf gene. He also had a Z in his surname, which meant it would score highly in a game of surname scrabble (not like Smith or Brown, yawn). So with completely rational interest peeked, we had a full three days to get to know each other before Konstantin had to return to Munich for exams.

We cycled along and I desperately tried to make a good impression. I even pretended to be interested in physics. He sounded so cool – he raced downhill mountain bikes, he was training to be a ski instructor, he was exotic (okay, this might be a stretch, I mean, he wasn’t British). I wanted him to think I was cool too. This was hard. Mainly because I’m not. But, here, on the bikes, I could pretend. I even sort of looked like I knew what I was doing. I had proper shiny yellow panniers and everything. Until the log happened. Konstantin shouted a warning as he jumped his bike gracefully over a massive log crossing the path. I had no time to react – I hit it square on, whacked on one set of brakes like a complete amateur, and went flying over my handlebars and landed fully on my head right at Konstantin’s feet.

That’s it. For now….here’s those links again to get reading the whole thing….

Buy it either on kindle from here or in paperback from here.