Why go around the world on a tandem?
Why not? We've often heard "you must be crazy!" ... but not doing it would be even crazier.
The main reason is that we CAN do this, and we know we will probably never have the opportunity again. This is probably a good enough reason: it's a one in a lifetime experience!
We both have always had the travel bug, and we cought the tandem bug together.
We've always wanted to go for "a long bike ride", mainly because we found holidays are always too short. No matter the lenght of the trip, the end of it and the return home is always a heavy load on our minds.
For this journey, we want to be able to give ourselves the time we need, not just the time we're "allowed". Always having a next destination, going further
We would have done this trip after our graduations if we had the cash ... but we decided to both work in Leeds for a few years and save up some money. These 4 years have been a good experience though, and they have given even more importance to this trip.
As students, we wanted to travel because it just sounded better than working. I could read the sign "last chance before you get into the system". But now, doing this trip means a lot more: it means leaving a good comfortable life behind, a house, jobs. It means leaving the system rather than just avoiding it, and it feels great!
The tandem is for us the perfect way to travel. Touring on bikes is the best way of getting really close to the people and places we'll visit: it's slow enough to catch every single detail of the journey, but fast enough to get us across countries and continents.
And the tandem adds synergy to our team: we'll be in this together, no matter what. After all that's what we were told when we got married: we're supposed to be ONE, so why have TWO bikes?