Why do people always call it the ‘home straight?’ Ted says to me as we ride side-by-side on the perfectly straight, perfectly flat, perfectly paved, purpose-built cycle path, ‘Why is it never the home wiggle!?’ – In all honesty, I had never really thought about it, but we were about to find out why….

We left Budapest on the hottest day of the year so far. The city was alive with people, but everyone was clinging to the walls of the buildings, walking or cycling in the small sliver of shade granted by the tall stonework. The parks looked empty on first glance, until I noticed everyone was just huddled beneath the shade of the trees. All water features had children running through them, fully dressed, screaming and laughing. We soon joined the pristine cyclepath that ran alongside the river and were thankful for the small amount of breeze we created with our own momentum. It was too hot to think, or to stop, or to do anything other than keep gently spinning the legs to keep that breeze brushing over our skin. We had set an ambitious plan to stay with our friends in Vienna three days after leaving Budapest, so given the extreme heat, we had picked the easiest path and set off. It meant covering over 110kms a day to reach them in time, but thankfully for us cyclepath riding is the easiest thing you can imagine – you don’t need to engage your brain, you just keep turning your legs, drinking water and reapplying the sun cream until you arrive at your destination.

So from Budapest we quickly made it to Bratislava and then to Vienna. We found ourselves on a European city tour; a world away from our adventurous back-country riding in exotic locations. We felt like fish out of water, on very over the top bikes and in very shabby clothing, but staying with our friends in Vienna was a real treat, we loved catching up with them and enjoying city life for a few days.

From there we hatched a plan to try and avoid the worst of the summer heat, to head North into Poland, then back to the UK via Sweden and Denmark. So we plotted a route that was definitely not a ‘home straight’ and instead was a ‘home wiggle’. It was ambitious – almost 3000kms in 5 weeks – but looking at the elevation profile it was all pancake-flat, so not undoable. We wanted the end of our trip to still feel like a bit of a challenge, to feel as though we had something to aim for, to push us onwards for the last month. So as we left Vienna and waved goodbye to our friends, we pushed aside the familiar feeling of deep fatigue that now sits within every part of our bodies and dug into what was left of our physical reserves.

But what we hadn’t really appreciated was that it was our mental reserves that were fraying. Less than 12 hours from Vienna, and the temperature plummeted from 40°c to 15°c in a matter of hours, as the weather broke, storm clouds rolled in, the wind picked up to 80kmp/h and the torrential rain started. It didn’t stop for 4 days. We were stuck riding under a swirling low pressure weather system, that followed us day-after-day.

Riding in the torrential rain and brutal headwind is never fun, but if you have a plan for the day, and some mental reserves to draw from, you can rationalise that we have everything we need with us, its only a bit of water and we’ll dry off (eventually!).

But with 22 months of life on the road having taken its toll, it didn’t take much for us to start struggling. The physical tiredness we feel is nothing compared to the exhaustion of the endless decision making and discussions about every small thing. When travelling as a couple, nothing is an individual choice – when you eat, what you eat, when you stop, when you keep going  – everything you do affects the other person, so must be spoken about – it’s truly exhausting. And when both of you are tired, wet, hungry, cold and bracing your heavy bike against the headwind, the conversation – ‘what shall we do?’ ‘I don’t know, what do you think?’ ‘I don’t know’ – gets very infuriating, very quickly. It didn’t take much for us both to start snapping at one another.

Soon enough every time we tried to make a decision about even the simplest things, the discussion would turned into an argument. Neither of us had the energy or mental reserves to be the best versions of ourselves anymore. The tiredness had peeled back the layers, and whatever remained was being washed away in the pouring rain. We were perpetually reverting to the ugly, brutal, unkind versions of ourselves. The versions we usually try and keep hidden, even from our loved ones. But the thing about a trip like this is that, no matter how hard you try, you can’t hide those parts of yourself. There will be times when the monsters appear, and when they do, there is no escaping them, there is no space between you to let off steam, there is no one else to turn to. Ted and I have been together for so many years that, before this trip, I would have said we have already seen every version of one another, but I couldn’t have been more wrong, this trip is different. To see the worst version of your husband, to retaliate with the worst version of yourself, day-after-day, to endure the monsters you both are and to somehow still decide to keep forgiving one another, to keep going, to keep loving one another even when you don’t feel like it – that is hard. It’s not fun.

But we kept battling on. Another long day, another wet and cold day, another day of un-stimulating cyclepath, another day of the same bread, tomato and cucumber lunch, another day of getting annoyed about the hours spent searching for a water tap, another day of snappy comments, another day of being too tired to be patient and kind, another day….another day….another day. Until, late one afternoon we cycled through a campsite, heading to the woods to wild camp, as the torrential rain hit us. Again. And Ted lost it. His anger and frustration raging out of him as he shouted to me over the noise of the rain on our hoods – “What are we doing!? This is so stupid. I’m done” – and held his head in his hands. And he was right. It was stupid. We were trying to save the cost of a €6 campsite, and all for what!? Our brains felt like mush, overloaded with too many considerations and floundering without social support to help us through it all – our stupid decisions were the result, and we only had ourselves to blame. Enough was enough. We turned around and headed back to the campsite.

And with the incoming calm, grey dawn of the following day, we realised we had to face some uncomfortable truths. We had to make some choices. We chose to change our route, to avoid the bad weather system we had been stuck in. We chose to remove ambitious daily distances. We chose to make time to stop and rest, so our bodies could regain some strength. We chose to acknowledge that our mental reserves needed replenishing. We chose to be kinder to ourselves and to one another. We chose to turn that ‘home wiggle’ into a much more predictable ‘home straight’ across Germany and the Netherlands, directly to the ferry port that would take us home.

Ultimately, we chose ‘us’. We chose each other and our relationship as the most important thing. And at that point, I knew we were going to make it.

We set off on our ‘home straight’. Things weren’t magically fixed over night. We still had to work at not falling back into old habits, we still had to try to not be snappy with one another, we still had to make the effort not to be grumpy. But something had changed, knowing that both of us had made that choice, that we had seen the worst versions of ourselves and each other, had endured it all, and we both still chose ‘us’. It became a strength we could both draw upon, a strength that would see us all the way home.