no wonder everyone bike tours Austria

…
The sixth week of our bike ride.
– Turn on 4K because everything looks better in 4K.

– Austria was great for our Europe bike packing/bike touring journey, but plenty more of the European adventure coming up in the next few weeks.

– Special thanks to all the legends who helped us along the way.

Idk how copyright works, I’m sure YT has listed the songs used below.

[Applause] [Music] Papa papa. Ah, [Music] good side. F me my water. [Music] [Applause] So, how do you keep pushing your comfort zone? According to the somewhat pseudocience 2190 rule, by the sixth week of our bike tour, we were right in the sweet spot for when habits form, which definitely felt accurate because by now we felt right at home with life on the bike. But it also means if things aren’t going wrong as much, it’s probably less entertaining. So, right as we were setting off on our week’s goal of making it to Italy by the end of the week, at least my tires were making sure to give us an obstacle. After ending week five with two flat tires, first thing in the morning this week, I was fixing another one. But hell yeah, we got it fixed. And hopefully no more flats from here on out. Right after having fixed the last tire, I have my fourth flat tire of the last 15 hours. Probably not going to get super angry. Not going to be over the top loud. Just feeling defeated. We were out of spare tubes by the time my first one went out. And now it’s a Sunday. Nowhere is open. This sucks. I wasn’t exactly taking it well. So instead of fixing it, we bunker down in a bus stop to enjoy breakfast, which is probably a good example of me not turning the camera on when I’m the one showing frustration. And this is probably the moment where Vincent’s probably been the angriest the whole trip. I remember when we pulled up to change his tire, he was just pulling all the [ __ ] out of his bag and just throwing it on the ground trying to get what he needed to change the flat. Yeah, he didn’t didn’t look like he was in the best mood. And to top it off, I think this was a Sunday, so there were no grocery stores open, so it’s not like we could ride off, get something some uh milk or products to lift the mood. We couldn’t even do that. So, we’re kind of just stuck there changing the tires, but we got there in the end. I’m sure Vinnie will explain his mood a bit better. Huzzah! Fixed. In the end, a quick fix was better than nothing. But, as I didn’t take the time to fix it properly, the issue resurfaced in no time. But at least now with some food and coffee, I was in a much better headsp space to fix it properly. Found a little hole. Had a rough morning. Was super dewy last night. Everything kind of got wet and then Vincent’s front tire went down and his back tire went down. Couldn’t find the hole. Vincent got a little bit cranky and it’s a Sunday so we couldn’t go and get food from the supermarket. So, we haven’t end up getting away until about 11:30, 12. But there’s some massive mountains ahead of us. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t be more excited to try and ride up them. So, I’m glad I fixed the tire properly because the riding wasn’t getting any easier. In fact, it was getting much harder, specifically in the vertical sense because like a massive Austrian hill towering above us, there was a massive Austrian hill towering above us. Up until this point, this was the biggest climb we’d faced. I don’t know how Riley and Kelly felt, but I was definitely a bit intimidated. Kind of as expected, but this hill is [ __ ] Hopefully, the view is worth it. Oh, yeah. [ __ ] I think a big thing we were all kind of simultaneously like looking forward and you know anxious about uh obviously it’s like a lot of climbing. This is the part where we start hitting hills and mountains. The part I’ve been dreading the most for this trip cuz um back in France I was just I’m sure you can cut back to some of the footage. I was [ __ ] going up like the smallest hill. But thankfully all that was training for this point. I think I was bottom gear the whole time and just absolutely cocking it. But I didn’t stop once on any of the hills, which is pretty nice. Even though walking would probably been quicker cuz I was going sideways. I see the top. Well, at least I [ __ ] hope it’s the top. After all the work to get up, the view was barely even worth it. Like, still pretty cool, but was kind of hoping for a bigger payoff. There wasn’t much of a view at the top. Like, we got to the top of where we were riding, and to get further to get to the view, you had to hike up or go up a cable car or something like that. So, it was a little bit disappointing that we didn’t get a reward for going all the way up. But going up the hill did at least guarantee us one thing. So, very quickly, we cashed in on the downhill. On the way down was pretty fun. That was when I realized that these steep hills were worth it cuz we get a [ __ ] sick decline going down. There goes all our elevation. But it wasn’t all good news reaching the bottom. So, you probably just watched Riley bomit down this hill, which I just did the same. And I’ve now just realized I took my towel off when I was cleaning my bike. And the towel is all the way at the [ __ ] top of the hill again. Think I might have just donated the towel to the hill. I can’t really picture myself going back up to get it. Someone up there will appreciate it. It’s a very nice towel. So, while it did hurt to say goodbye to the towel, I’ve actually noticed that in summer towels are kind of dead weight. You can kind of just dry yourself with your t-shirt or whatever. Um, yeah, haven’t really needed to use the towel in the past 7 days. So, there’s a note for anyone that wants to go bike touring in the future. What a hell. Thought we were done with hills. A cemetery. Well, we’ve got to check out a cemetery, don’t we? Have a guess what that says. Kind vasa. Please drink. [Music] But on to more exciting things like where are we going to be sleeping for the night? As we enjoyed some more traditional Austrian food, we discovered some awesome news. Our challenge of not paying for accommodation was going to be a lot easier for the upcoming days. You see, the rules on wild camping vary between provinces in Austria. Half of them didn’t allow it with hefty fines, but the one we were in, Styia, did. So, wanting to make the most of this, we wanted to find the coolest place possible to camp. Some quick scanning on Google Maps and we landed on a castle at the top of a hill. But halfway on our journey there, we had a swimming offer we simply couldn’t refuse. 2. But of course, mountain water is cold, like [ __ ] freezing. So, we channeled our inner Wimhof and jumped in. Holy [ __ ] this Wimhof so much on my legs. My legs have never had so much Wimhof before, which I like to think helped with our physical recovery along with getting rid of all our sweat. But of course, the sweat was about to return as our ascent towards the castle was about to begin. What’s the climb? Maybe 100 or so m60. 180 184 1 m decline. Really really dive into that 1 m. And on brand for us, we took longer than expected with our usual habit of getting lost on the way up. [ __ ] in the dark. I fell off twice and rode straight into a bush. There she is. Time to enter the castle and ended up finding this like amazing castle ruins to sleep in for the night. Um, it was kind of like a big climb to finish the day, but we like climbed up this mountain, found this like really old massive castle ruins and there’s obviously just no one there and it’s not like a big, you know, attraction to be honest. It wasn’t like fenced off or anything. It was just it was just sitting there. So, we had a pretty great time sleeping there. Oh, we were doing some sick Fortnite references. Look how [ __ ] goated it is. Wait, what the [ __ ] Why is there a light on? Wait, what the [ __ ] It’s a Fortnite player. That’s a god. It’s pretty funny how quickly moods can change over the course of a day. 12 hours earlier, I was in the shittest mood possible with my flat tires, but now I couldn’t be happier. I think this first day was maybe one of my favorite days of the entire trip. Actually, it was everything that I would have summarized bike packing as it it kind of had it all. You know, having bike troubles to start the day to having, you know, breakfast in a little bus shelter. And we started like one of our biggest clims for the trip so far. But best of all, we knew we’d get to wake up in a castle. [Music] The next day, we got to actually see the castle cuz we kind of got there in the dark uh last night and it was pretty great. It was one of the I think better camping spots I think you could ask for on a bike packing trip. I think this day we kind of just we rode quite a bit. It was pretty hot. Uh we stopped for some ice cream, some coke, pretty standard stuff. We decided to go toward the lake. [Music] [Music] But despite some scenic riding, the actual excitement of day 2 came at night. So, I’ll try to quickly summarize the day. There was good food, good riding, and towards later on, a lake that sounded lovely to swim at. However, a place to swim soon became of a lesser concern. This was because there was a significant storm forecast for the night ahead. So, finding a place to sleep with a roof was becoming our main priority. But despite the stress, we still took a moment to take in the scenery around us. [Music] Yeah. It’s like I’ll be back in my room. I’ll be watching a picture of this right now. But like right now it’s actually happening. [Music] The good news was that we had a warm showers contacting George who had said that we could stay the night. But with faulty network errors in the mountains, we were unable to reach him throughout the day. So due to that, we weren’t able to check if the office still even stood, let alone not knowing what location we were even meant to be riding to. So we kept on just aimlessly riding onwards. But honestly, as the sun was setting, everything was looking pretty damn cinematic. Where are you running? Oh, it’s the mountains. It’s horrible. No, no, no. Those aren’t mountains. They’re waves. [ __ ] Maybe do some beep beeps on your on your cockpit. But now what do we try find a camp spot with the impending storm or wait it out a bit longer and hope signal improves enough for a message from George to come through. Best tap water in Europe apparently says everyone is the best. So as we did one last pit stop at a petrol station the miracle happened. George’s message came through telling us his doors were open and told us where to go. But now a new issue emerged. It was fully dark and his place was an extra 20 km away in the direction of the lightning. Some usual deliberation ended with the decision that it was worthwhile making the journey. Okay, we’re good. Let’s go get a warm showers. So, night riding towards the storm was now the plan. Holy [ __ ] This isn’t ideal. can only see a meter in front. It’s difficult to explain the feeling of riding through these swerving streets and mountains with nothing but a bike torch. Trucks were flying past and lightning lit up the sky in the direction that we were headed. But god damn did it give off this eerie yet captivating feeling. We ended up deciding to push through and make it all the way there pretty late at night. And it ended up being great cuz he, you know, he had some food ready for us. Um, and he was a lovely host. We didn’t get to see him very much, unfortunately, cuz we got there so late and he had to leave early in the morning with not only a wonderful room to sleep in, but the most delicious curry prepared for us. To say that we felt blessed would be an understatement. Just an all round just a just a coat pretty much. He had this awesome cat called Meow. It’s too bad we got there so late and we couldn’t, I don’t know, share some stories with him and have a bit of a chat, but it was a great accommodation regardless. So, along with feeling blessed, we clearly also felt very tired because boy did we have a long sleep in. George was off at work, so we had the house to ourselves, but fair to say we probably spent a bit longer than needed at George’s house. like a a nice reset after a couple days camping. But at least it was a great opportunity to do some fixes like on my drone that I’d crashed about 100 times at this point. But even after leaving his house, our laziness didn’t stop. Decided to go to a supermarket, ended up sitting there for like 2 hours, which was, I think, a product of us being a little tired and not really wanting to cycle. Um, I think we started our ride at like 3:00 p.m. [ __ ] around for way too long trying to figure out what to do, which is pretty standard. Quiet, Vinnie. Problem with directing is that Vinnie loves bombing down hills and there’s always a turn before you go down the hill. So Vinnie always goes down the wrong way. So twice in the space of 10ks. Sometimes you just got to let the man enjoy the bomb. Hope Vinnie went this way. So by the time we finally got properly riding, it was already 3:00 p.m. But morning, midday, nighttime, it didn’t matter. This part of Austria was stupidly picturesque. Like literally every direction you looked, it was a damn dream. Just some beautiful spots. Some absolutely like stunning parts. I think these were some of my favorite parts of the whole trip. This kind of It was just all so green and mountainous. The It’s hard to even kind of describe. It kind of felt dreamlike a little bit. It was like almost surreal. Um everything felt almost like too green, you know? I guess maybe that’s a product of growing up in the middle of Australia where everything’s red and dirt and brown trees. But yeah, I was I was having an amazing time. So, of course, we had to take the opportunity to go for a swim in genuinely what felt like the middle of paradise. But when I say we, I mean Kelly and myself because Riley didn’t feel like swimming and rode ahead. So now we’d lost him. But thanks to having an Apple Air Tag in all our bikes, he wasn’t going to get far before we could hunt him down. So, right after him, we did. And what was he doing? Having a dinner in an Austrian pub. You’re tracking me. Dinner meant nighttime. And in the mountains, nighttime apparently meant lightning. But with no hopes of a Georgeesque warm shower savior this night, we needed to find somewhere with a roof ourselves. So, the idea of paying for accommodation was sort of suggested with the lightning, but we figured we’d made it this far in the trip, so surely we could somehow just make it work again. Very quickly, we split off in different directions to find options. The first spot was kind of like a horse stable sort of thing, but it had a bunch of signs saying that there was security around along with being next to a main road, so we didn’t feel too invited. Looks like someone’s house. I think people will understand, right? Thunderstorm. Yeah, we’re going to die otherwise. Does it say on Google Maps what this place is? Riley said that he’d found some sort of shed or mill sort of place on Google Maps not too far away. So, he went off to explore that. And after not hearing back from him, Kelly and me eventually went in the same direction. Forgot to turn the camera on, but um some Chad and his girlfriend just told us there was a free house down the road. He basically said if we go down the road, we should have enough shelter there for three people. No one else will be there. So, thank you, random Chad guy. But either that Chad was lying or we’re just blind because we never ended up finding this supposed magical free [ __ ] house. Was it any good? It seemed okay. I mean, I didn’t I I looked at it for all of So, the second option we found was essentially a crack house. This was probably one of the best examples of how far our standards had fallen. I’ve seen worse. I’d leave here. And it was pretty funny cuz we walked in, we both saw the four walls around it and the roof and we all went and we went like, “Yeah, we could probably stay here.” But at the start of the trip, if I saw that place, I would [ __ ] book out of there cuz it was generally just dodgy as [ __ ] Like I felt like anyone was going to come come up at any moment and just start doing [ __ ] heroin or some [ __ ] I don’t know. Would have been good for the story. But yeah. Yeah. Seems pretty chill. There’s a roof over our head. Maybe not a floor below us. Basically, it was a crack house. I don’t think there actually was a needle on the floor, but it’s the type of place you would have seen like a needle on the floor. There’s like graffiti all over the walls. There’s no light. It’s just like a small dark room um in the middle of the forest. And we all looked at each other and like had a moment initially of like this is pretty good. And I think we then immediately realized that how far we’ve uh stooped to think that, you know, sleeping in an abandoned crack house was um you know, considered living it up. Yeah, I’m leaning against crack down. I’d go horse table. So, we decided to go back to the horse stables, which um I think was the better option. It was like on next to the road, but I don’t think we were in too much trouble of um having anyone be mad at us. Um, and so yeah, we had a a nice sleep. So, as lightning lit up the night sky, we had ourselves a place of rest. So, it was probably better waking up at the stables than it was at the crack den. In fact, all three of us felt like we’d had pretty good sleeps, which was important as we had our biggest climb of the journey so far to face. The climb would see us ride our way to a ski resort at the top of Takahur. So, with plenty of work to do, we all set off on our bikes with a great energy. And we all accidentally go the wrong way cuz Vinnie is following road signs. I’m following Stfan’s commute and Riley’s following his own commute that he made. Where’s Vincent? I’m just following the R2. The R2 goes the wrong way cuz we’re meant to go down. Interesting. I’ve got construction ahead of me. I don’t know if I can go through cuz there’s workers. Oh, well, I found a pretty [ __ ] sick cave that has like a bolt line that goes along it that you can like hold on to and climb. Wait, you going to go further ahead, Ry? You going to wait for us there? No, I’m just going to look at this [ __ ] This [ __ ] is [ __ ] Okay, you stay there and keep vibing and looking at [ __ ] and we’ll we’ll catch up. So, the linkup spot ended up being this really cool cave tunnel sort of thing, which had a gorgeous river running right through it. But even better, it had a VFRA climbing course going up the side of it. Obviously, we had no harnesses, but that didn’t stop Riley trying to do the whole course free solo Alex Hnold style. But to no surprise, this was a pretty sketchy idea. Tensions were especially high when we got to this latter part where, you know, he was pretty high up and any sort of fall meant the tour would be over for him. I was getting pretty nervous and Kelly could barely watch, but he survived. So now it was time to make our way up the mountain. [Music] This hill is giving me the business some snail ass pace 6ks an hour. My challenge to myself is to not get off. It’s gone the last 30 minutes without water, which isn’t great in these temperatures and the climb. So, found this lovely tap. I mean, it’s probably just river water, but [ __ ] it, tastes good. What wasn’t pretty good was the thousand m of incline ahead. Fortunately, by this point of the tour, my fitness was at a level where it barely even affected me. God damn. Straight up. My lower back is killing me. I don’t know why that’s the thing that’s hurting the most. We’re almost at the top. Holy [ __ ] All the way right into the Alps properly now up to an actual ski resort. This place was called Taka or something like that. Something crazy in German. But this for my mind was definitely the hardest one. Okay, so the heat and the climbing was affecting me quite a bit. But I had one of my favorite moments of the whole tour on my way up this hill. It’s a shame I didn’t get it on camera. But there’s a bunch of houses on the way up to the top of the mountain. So obviously it was a particularly hot day and right as I was getting near the top I was doing everything I could just stay on the bike, stay on the bike. But at that moment I looked to my right and at one of the houses there’s a family doing a bit of like yard work. And they’ve gotten one of their kids who looks maybe 11 or 12 years old to do some of the physical labor. And similar to me, he looks like he’s just in personal hell. So, he’s holding this like bucket of water or something and he’s trying to walk it from one end of the backyard to another. And to be honest, he just looks miserable and dirty. But then he looks at me and I look back at him. Both of us in physical pain. It’s stinking hot. Without even saying anything, we kind of just looked at each other, smile, gave a nod. I don’t know. It’s kind of hard to explain, but it felt like we were just communicating to each other. What the hell are we doing right now? Um, so good luck to that kid out there, wherever he is. Anyways, at least reaching this summit was absolutely worth it. Like, honestly, a lake this high above sea level is so damn foreign to me, and it’s just so freaking cool. Although, while going for a swim, Riley and me were beginning to wonder where the hell Kelly was. I’m not too sure if they’ve gone up the highway or the gravel road. And I thought for Vincent’s sake, I’ll film this just in case I’m the only one that went up the gravel road. So, I was pretty much fighting for my life going up this gravel this gravel track cuz it was pretty much underneath the ski slopes and I don’t even know if I’d call it gravel. My my phone ran out of storage so I couldn’t film all of it. But the steep hills were just rocks and you couldn’t get a grip. Like even pushing the bike up, I couldn’t get a grip on the bike and I couldn’t get a grip on my feet. So, I was just absolutely cooked. All right, so the gravel road travel continues and I actually got lost and went up there, which was a really steep and long incline. And then I checked my commute and it turns out I went the wrong way and I missed this little turn which goes across the river and supposedly up to another path. I believe we are going to Turk. I think I get to the top and the other boys have already had a swim and they’re ready to eat. They’ve been waiting for like half an hour or something like that cuz all they did was go up a [ __ ] highway which was the shorter way as well as the easier way. Not to take it away from them. I’m sure it was tough. And even when we get up, I’m like, “Oh, we we’ll have food first so that those guys can eat and then I’ll go for a swim afterwards.” And the second we’re done with eating, just it gets cold as [ __ ] windy as [ __ ] at the top of this [ __ ] ski slope. So, I don’t even get to go for a swim, which kind of sucked. But disregarding that, beers was the first priority. And hey, the guy running the pub seemed to like Australians. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. So, in uh Austria, we had about two of these little bumps here, they look they look pretty kind and gentle and this view, but because there’s so many of them, they’re kind of intense. So when we hit the board in Italy, we get hit with about 1 2 3 4 5 probably around six plus a bunch of smaller ones which all have red on them. But I wasn’t ready to think about all the upcoming hill climbs just yet. So we moved on to the much more important issue of dessert. The vending machine had the answer for our milker chocolate addiction, but it had four freaking KitKat bars blocking it. So we knew what we had to do. If it’s just another strawberry milker it we need to know. We’re going to go through four packets of KitKat chunky just to find out the glorious milk. Milk product acquired. Oh no. Extremely strawberry. What? Okay, so now it was sleep time. Our plan ahead for the next few days was pretty straightforward. We knew we had a warm showers host by the name of Durk to stay at in 2 days time, but because his place was less than 100 km away, we made the plan to hopefully find somewhere to camp for two nights at the current Austrian mountain resort we were at. So, we figured next to a smaller lake was our best bet to be off private property. But this is where legal technicalities got interesting. As mentioned, the state we were in, wild camping was legal. But the state next to us, it wasn’t. So, where we set up camp, it was quite literally 30 m away from the province border. And there’s essentially a state crossing about 30 m that way. If we’re over on that side doing wild camping, it’s a $3,800 fine to get caught. But over on this side, no problemmo. I think there might still be a problem if we’re on private property. Yeah. And I feel like there’s a fair chance we might be. It’s a holiday house normal time. But it was good enough for us and we knew we needed a good sleep because the next day we had a mountain to explore [Applause] Hey, you okay down there? I don’t know. Do you know where we are? No, I’m a little lost myself, but uh maybe uh we head up to the top of the mountain up there and see what’s around. Is it okay if I come with you? Yeah, it’ be good to go with someone else. So, long have you been here? Not that long. Woke up maybe a couple of days before you, I think. [ __ ] Feel like I haven’t been here for a day. What was that? Ben clock. Okay. [Music] What do you think it all means? [Music] Does it have to mean something? [Music] [Music] There it is. Do you want to explain to the viewers at home what happened last night? Last night I got tucked by a fox. I didn’t hear anything cuz I was like basically asleep and I start to feel something like nudge my uh bivvie in the middle of the night instead of nudging like pulling on it and then it was like biting and and I wake up obviously but it wasn’t doing like major damage like it was like just a bit of tugging and then I see it was a fox and so I tried to like chew it away but bro wasn’t scared he just kind of like stood there staring at me and we kind of just stared at each other. So then I got the torch out and was like, “Yeah, how about how you feel about this thing?” And then felt fine about it actually. It just stood there and looked at it, too. And went over to Vinnie’s tent and I was like, “All right, problem solved.” Um, so how’s the fox? So after a good day of hiking to the summit, we were ready to ride to our next warm showers host. But I realized pretty damn quickly I left my damn pit vipers on the hike somewhere. Got to do yesterday’s hike again cuz I lost my pit vipers yesterday. Oh, hey, here they are. So, we really did have to get going now. But meeting a friendly New Zealander in the mountains did delay things a little more. It’s always cool running into someone from our little corner of the world. Are you coming around the coast? Like we’re hoping to maybe to make it to the coast on the west side if we’ve got enough time. So, like south front around and then down the road or you coming down inland? No, we’re going inland. Inland. Okay. Yeah. But now we really did have to start riding with some pace if we wanted to visit our warm showers hosts of Durk and Anna on time. The pace thing wasn’t going to be a problem because after all our previous day struggles of riding uphill, it was time to cash in on our downhill reward. We ride very quick down here. We end up down there and progressed through there. Very cool. We even hit a personal record for top speed with Riley cracking 80 km an hour. But speed didn’t lessen our ability to take in the views. They were once again stunning. In fact, the whole ride to Durk’s place was it was pretty amazing. Like those windy kind of serpentine roads just getting to absolutely like bomb it down on the bike going like I think we hit max like maybe 80 85ks an hour. It was just yeah amazing riding. Um something I probably won’t forget for a long time. Um and something I definitely made me want to do something similar again. I’m genuinely running out of words to describe how beautiful Austria is. So, here’s hoping this vlog can just be an advertisement for whoever is watching it to go see Austria themselves. You going? Yeah. Get going up that way. These hills ain’t stopping. They are not stopping. And I told you to be patient. And I told you to be fine. And I told you to be balanced. And I told incredible. But the ride eventually did have to stop because we’d arrived. And what an arrival destination it was. Nice to meet you, Luke. Luke. Not only was the home incredible with some lovely beds to get our rest in, but Durk and Anna were two of the kindest and most genuine people you could hope to meet. and they had such great stories about their travels and their kind of bike packing experiences, trips in like Colorado, and it was great to hear like about others stories. The generosity didn’t stop with simply hosting us. However, Durk noted that we were near one of the most beautiful mountain views in all of Austria. But the fact that we didn’t have enough time to ride up to see the view didn’t deter him. So, he hopped into his car and said, “Come with me, boys.” And drove us to the top. The drive was pretty cool, especially with a herd of what I can only imagine is the official milker cows blocking the roads, but even getting past that, the car couldn’t take us all the way to the summit. Durk had let us pack two bikes in the car for a mountain descent. So, while Durk, Anna, and Kelly walked up, Riley, and myself slogged it up on the bikes. How’s the views, Riley? [ __ ] And there’s cows up here. There’s cows up here. But words won’t do the next part justice. So, I just won’t say any [Music] and kill action. But my personal highlight was an emo mountain horse. Where are you? And I’m so sorry. I cannot sleep. I cannot dream tonight. But the hike, the view was just [ __ ] awesome. We could see the mountain we’d climbed the day before. There’s an emo horse in the notes. There’s a horse with a big [ __ ] as well. You see pyramid looking mountain? Yep. Just the ones behind that one. I don’t know if you can you can barely make them out with your eyes. All right, Vincent in the edit. Maybe you can see that. If not Jordan, right? [Music] Took Riley’s bike up cuz Anna was going to mountain bike down. And Derek was like, “We can take one more bike.” And obviously we we told Riley to go and do it. Have fun. It didn’t feel feel quite as rewarding because we hadn’t cycled maybe the entire way up. And so that was a bit of a realization to me that just getting dropped off at the car park and then riding all the way down isn’t quite the same. But it was amazing nonetheless. Like I think going that fast on a bike feels pretty great. So while Riley and Anna got the privilege of riding down, Kelly, Durk, and myself took the walking route. Hearing about Durk’s life as a Cirusle performer highlighted to me the exact type of interesting and different people I was hoping to meet on a tour like this. Santo, we could never do enough to say thank you to Dirk and Anna, but cooking up a risotto for dinner maybe went a small way towards doing that. [Music] Oh, you’re right. And then the next day, we have breakfast with Durk and Anna. Another standard bready breakfast, which was so tasty, but not good for Riley cuz his stomach [ __ ] sucks with that [ __ ] Doesn’t like gluten or something. But we ride into town with Durk and Anna and say our goodbyes. I think it it’s always really cool when we get to go ride with these guys that we that we meet in warm showers because I don’t know, it’s always cool when someone jumps tags along. Feels like we made a friend. They’re part of our group. So, after saying goodbye to Durk and Anna, the idea for today was to make it all the way to Italy. But the reality was we’d have to ride at a good pace and not get distracted to achieve that goal. Stopping to listen to the footy doesn’t help that idea. target. Holy [ __ ] Stopping to refill our water bottles in the clearest stream I’ve ever seen also doesn’t help that. But at least it was pretty damn satisfying to drink. And then of course they were stopping to take in the scenery. It was quite clear that we were beginning to enter the Doommites. And even though it’s just the start of them, my god was it stunning. I keep using that damn word stunning, but I don’t know. I don’t have a very good vocabulary. I think this was again just some of the most beautiful parts of any country we went to. Uh just like beautiful little streams in the mountains, beautiful grass, beautiful trees, like big valleys that we would ride through with mountains on either side. Sky was blue. It was all just perfect if I’m honest. Tell you what, GoPro, this is pretty [ __ ] pretty. It’s close to Mulura level. I’ll tell you that. This is like This is like the Murray Steiner. Big Steiner. Very big Steiner. Claim Steiner. I mean Ger Steiner. But all the stopping did cause an issue for us though. You see, we had had no food for lunch or dinner that day. But the nearest grocery store was 15 km away and it was closing in less than 30 minutes. Due to this, we had to put on the afterburners to get there before it closed. Max was stopping. The grocery store was closing, so the other two raced ahead, and I just kind of just I don’t know, pedal along at my own pace. I think I was going like 15ks an hour or something like my legs were just [ __ ] gassed. But they got there just in time to buy food. I think we just broke the land speed record for riding a bike 10ks. Look at this guy. Cool. So, food was sorted. Next problem was the usual one, finding some shelter for the night. Once again, there was lightning and rain on the forecast, so finding somewhere with a roof was preferable. Need to find that somehow in here somewhere. Riley’s solution was to sleep in a car park. Homeless people are professional homeless. They they’ve figured this [ __ ] out. They got the hacks. Probably a big lesson from this tour is that finding a spot to camp is much easier than finding an actual shelter. So, there was a bit of uncertainty as we rode into the night. But on the other hand, it was a strange feeling. We were so used to finding our sleep spots at the very last minute by now that despite the search going on for many more kilometers and hours than we’d hoped, there was always this feeling that something would eventually just turn up. This feeling was probably best highlighted with us riding past an absolutely buzzing local soccer match and finding ourselves in absolutely no rush to ride past it. [Laughter] right on into the night trying to beat the storm and we come across this soccer match which was I don’t know really cool like you think it’s just like a normal soccer match but they had a [ __ ] stadium full of seats at the back and the seats were all full like the crowd was going absolute bananas we pull up and the second we pull up they score a goal take and it turns out at the end of the match it was 1 nil so we pulled up right at the end and saw the only goal obviously just amateur level. But I don’t know, there’s a couple there’s a couple anchor messes going around. But eventually we did have to ride on with Kelly being a little bit less keen. And I think at this point I’m just done riding at night cuz I can’t see [ __ ] My light is dog [ __ ] I feel like I think I’ve already spoken about it when we ride at night. Feels like a race to get to where we’re sleeping and it’s at the end of the day so my legs are always tired and I don’t know. I just [ __ ] I struggle. But on the stroke of midnight, our home turned up. the most perfect hut we could have ever asked for. I go to sleep and I think that’s the end of the week. I think it’s probably one of the best weeks we had so far. We finally started to challenge ourselves with hills and I finally got to see what I could do which was make it up these hills funnily enough. And I don’t know, it was really rewarding getting the downhill and getting the views and I don’t know, meeting awesome people. So, we didn’t quite succeed with our week’s plan of making it to Italy. But, we did answer our question of how do you keep pushing your comfort zone. As long as we kept riding, the tour itself would keep pushing the limits for us. Because with life on the bike, every day would bring a new challenge that we’d never even thought of. Although, a challenge we did know of had officially arrived. The Doommites were only one more sleep away. Da [Music] da da da.