The plan was simple – catch a ferry from Turkiye to the Greek Island of Chios, sleep a couple of hours in the ferry terminal building, and in the early hours of the morning we would jump on the next ferry to the Greek mainland. But as we have learnt many, many times over on this trip, the expectation Vs the reality can be dishearteningly different. In fact, after being a ‘planner’ all my life, this trip has shown me that there are sometimes real benefits to Ted’s approach of ‘the best plan is to have no plan’ – I mean it’s only taken him the 24 years we’ve been together and a two year cycle trip to convince me, but I finally see it now – this ferry plan was a classic example of why.

As we pushed our bikes off our first ferry at around 9pm and onto the Greek island of Chios, we couldn’t see any buildings, let alone a ferry terminal. There was a small wooden hut with a glass window that acted as the ‘immigration office’ for our entry into Europe, but no terminal building, no orderly lines of parked cars waiting to board the next ferry, no ticket office, no conveniences for passengers, and definitely no seat in a quiet corner for two weary cyclists to sleep on. We scoured the port, convinced we were just missing it, we even bumped into a few other European tourists (who had the luxury of a car!) doing the same thing, but no, there was no such thing.

Convinced we could find somewhere to rest for a few hours we toured the town, we asked about with locals, we searched the internet but the best anyone could offer us was ‘go to a bar or club until you board at 3am!’ – Not a great option when you are two cyclists who don’t drink alcohol, are intimidated by loud noise and are usually in bed by 9pm! We couldn’t even find a place that we were comfortable with to pitch the tent, and it didn’t seem worth it for only a few hours. So we accepted the inevitability that the best we were going to find was a park bench. I mean, we didn’t just go for any old park bench, we made sure to search out a couple that were long enough to stretch out on, in a quiet area, smart looking, complete with stone slab as a pillow – perfect! At this stage of the trip, there are very few ‘firsts’ anymore, but this was a first for us. Maybe this now puts us into a higher bracket on the adventurous (or plain stupid!?) scale, maybe it means we have achieved proper bike-tramp status, or maybe it was just an inevitability at some point as part of life on the road. Ted managed to fall asleep in no-time, the familiar and comforting sound of his deep sleep breathing became the soundtrack to me lying on the adjacent park bench definitely not-sleeping, swating away mosquitos and startling at anyone walking by. By the time I heard the baker arrive at around 2am in the building next door and start his shift for the day, I had had enough. I gave up on trying to sleep, instead watching the baker work through the open backdoor and sing along to his kitchen radio, the delicious smell of cinnamon occasionally catching on the breeze.

We finally made it to the Greek mainland about 15 hours later and even though we were dishevelled, sleep deprived and boiling hot in the Greek sun, the significance of reaching the mainland of Europe wasn’t lost on us. After 20 months away, we were back.

Home really did feel like a short hop, skip and a jump from here. Everything felt much closer now, the cars looked familiar, we recognised the brand names in supermarkets and if felt like we were just on holiday, even the sun cream smelt like holidays on the Greek Islands as a teenager. But as we pitched up camp on the shores of a beautiful Greek beach, watching dolphins jumping through the waves and the sunset turn all the colours of the sky peachy, we were reminded of the reality of living doors and cycling this far south at this time of year – the prickly heat rash on my legs was burning, the mosquitoes were fierce and sleep remained elusive thanks to the stuffy, sweaty temperatures inside our tent. And this was right next to the coast, where we had the luxury of a sea breeze. We knew that if we had any hope of making it back to the UK over the summer months we had to move fast, to get out of the worst of the incoming heat and to head North. We couldn’t hang about, so we didn’t.

We crossed Greece and into Macedonia in a couple of days. Leaving the familiarity of the EU to head into Macedonia was a bit deflating, after feeling like we were so close to home, everything became different again. But we needn’t have worried as the friendly, warm people of Macedonia made us feel so welcome, and we realised we didn’t miss the EU necessities of fancy fast cars, having to pay to use a toilet, and playing the game of fizzy water roulette every time we bought water in a supermarket.

A few days later and we were in Kosovo, the countries rolled by so quickly. After so long spent in large countries it was fun to cross so many small ones in a short period of time. We are always excited and re-energised each time we cross a border; the change in landscapes, the diversity of people, the different languages, the new culture and the array of food. It never ceases to amaze me how a (usually) invisible line in the sand can be the catalyst for so much change. So we hopped from one country to the next enjoying their differences, uplifted by their similarities and fuelled on by Börek (a delicious veggie filled flaky pastry).

We even started bumping into more cycle tourists from Northern Europe and each time, we would enthusiastically throw ourselves into conversations with them, excited by the novelty of meeting some like minded individuals who could speak to us in English – A luxury we have not had for waaaaay too long. I think sometimes, those we met were taken back by our excitement, most of them were, after all, just on a couple of weeks holiday so they couldn’t quite compute why simply talking to them was such a treat for us.

We didn’t know much about the Balkans before we arrived, but each country we passed through felt distinctly different. It’s a region shaped and, in some places, still recovering from, recent wars. As children of the late 80s both Ted and I remember making Christmas Shoeboxes at school for children in Kosovo and Bosnia, it’s hard to imagine  what those children were going through when we packed up our unused toys and sent them to a land so far away with a strange sounding name.

In Kosovo, we hardly saw any older generations, everyone seemed so young. It felt like the new generation were making the most of life.  There was building work going on everywhere, every-other shop was a hardware store. Young people were driving about in fancy, shiny cars or big pickup trucks, or whizzing about on motorbikes or quad bikes. Huge restaurants held daily pool parties that looked and sounded raucous. And the mounds of rubbish and fly-tipping everywhere made it seem like the whole country was one big nationwide teenage house party, just waiting for parents to return, to turn down the music, to stop all the fun and to make them tidy up all the mess they have made.

Our favourite of all the Balkans was Montenegro. It’s so beautiful. The mountains are stunning. It’s like the Alps, but with none of the pretentiousness, hardly any people and no ridiculously overpriced mountain huts. It also gave us a chance to use our climbing legs again, and spend some time on glorious off-road mountain trails – it was blissful and reminded us why we are doing this.

Despite me wanting to slow down to make the most of the mountains, Ted kept pushing us on. It’s nothing new, he’s always more motivated than me to keep moving, but I noticed a few days where he was glued to his phone, always typing away to ‘no one’ apparently. A day or so later, he finally cracked and told me, he had been trying to arrange to meet my brother and his wife in Budapest in Hungary as a suprise. What an absolute joy – the thought of having family visit us after almost two years away was pretty overwhelming. I couldn’t quite believe it. It meant we now had a deadline to reach Budapest, and we had to keep moving, but what an incentive it was to keep pedalling.

So from Montenegro we wiggled into Albania, then back to Montenegro, then in to Bosnia, then we returned back into the EU in Croatia and then Hungary.

Every day seemed to bring with it an increase in soaring temperatures. Day-after-day we were recording temperatures of 50°c, or more, on our Garmin’s. We tried getting up earlier to ride before the heat really kicked in, we tried resting in the middle of the day, we tried riding later in the evening when things had cooled off – but none of it really worked. It was just so flippin’ hot, all the time. Everywhere. The only way to cool off was to seek out water, to drink, to put your head in, to jump in. So at every opportunity that’s exactly what we did. Everytime we felt the cool water on our skin we would remind each other of our time in Arizona and Utah in the USA, when we didn’t have the luxury of a swim to cool us off, and we wondered just how we had survived it.

So after a couple of weeks of somehow managing to bash out over 100kms a day in the scorching heat, we finally made it to Budapest – in fact we actually made it there a day early. We were both shattered, totally exhausted, but nothing could take away the joy of meeting my brother and his wife and spending the weekend with them. Being silly, having fun, catching up, telling them our tales, laughing lots and enjoying the city – it was exactly what Ted and I needed. They reminded us how to belly laugh. They filled our cup right up.  They filled us with so much love and gratitude. It was a perfect reminder of what was waiting for us back home.

And so, we set off again, holding tight onto the draws of home, fully charged for the next leg…the last leg… the only leg left…. From Budapest to Home…..