Some Ramblings

A day-to-day look back of the journey so far, and where I slept at the end of each day. Immense thanks to everyone who has helped me up to this point. Imagine how many more 'Bench 🙃's there would be without you!

I know this becomes a lot less fun to read when things aren't going well (unless you've been praying for my downfall from the get-go of course), but as you'll see, the numbers have really fallen off a cliff lately, which leaves me with a bit of a dilemma. I want to do this properly, but the route has become, well, patchy at best as of late, and for the life of me, I just can't find the guile to be doing consistent 35 km days anymore, especially with the decreasing hours of sunlight in the day. I could moan about different things for hours, but the main issue here is what I'm going to actually do. And the answer is: well, I have no idea. I think I'm suffering from some really bad burnout; mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion from the journey, so I might take some time to just *exist* for a bit in Bosnia before making any rash decisions, who knows.

As for where I've slept; I wanted to say something about wildcamping, because I've ended up doing much less than I expected to. Okay, it was easy in England, where I know the people, I know the culture, I know the law. If you ever have wildcamped before, maybe you've had that classic experience of paranoia the first time, I know I definitely did; and, I've had it all over again in every new country when trying that first wildcamp. In France, it wasn't so bad. In Belgium, the locals started to warn me not to. In Luxembourg, apparently the law states that you can spend a week in prison for the crime of camping on private property! In Germany, I was encouraged to by locals despite its illegality but became too scared of Germans themselves (lol). In Austria, I was warned that the authorities would tear me into tiny shreds and slap a fine ten times my net worth on my forehead. In Slovenia, it didn't even cross my mind. And in Croatia, I'm told that if the police don't get me, then a bear will. So hey, that's fun!Read more