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13/12/2025

This trip report is written by James Crossley after a 3 month cycle tour (and living experiment) in Spain, Italy and Greece. Through it he considers the pros, cons, ethics, and existentialism of trying to live on a bicycle for a period of time.

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My clothes and skin are crusted with mud, hair lank, bicycle still dripping. Remnants of the poorly hosed-off peanut butter thick mud are draining guiltily along the gridlines of the tiled terrace. I flip open my screen and log into slack. Inside the roadside café, Andalusians are clustered around the counter shouting their orders to a squad of lightening fast barristers. Google mail clonks open and I skim my unreads. Nothing urgent. I stand up and shuffle inside to order. I’m absorbed by Fordist coffee making, toast toasting, cold cut cutting. Eventually I place my order, awkwardly lingering too long before my low volume presence is eventually pitied and dealt with. Bread, tomato, garlic, olive oil, salt, coffee. Whipped up in an instant and I head back to the table. My quirky task management software sardonically greets my oily face. I’m not sure how this is going to work. I munch toast and stare dully at the deadlines.

It’s been only a few days, and I’m planning to be on the road for a few months. I’ve left the Netherlands temporarily because I can’t face the housing market and job hustle. Don’t want to struggle to exist every day just so I can line a landlords pockets. At least for a while. With the minimal budget of living on my bike, this one workday should pay for my existence for the full week, maybe more. It’s a position of incredible privilege, but also precarious, dirty, and only partially chosen. Who’s to say that even if someone does opt out, they really had the option to stay plugged in. I’m avoiding social responsibility in a system I disagree with, but others can’t escape at all. I’m using skills I learnt in ugly corporations to skirt the edges of capitalist existence and support grassroots advocacy initiatives. I feel conflicted about it all.

Travelling by bike. Sleeping in a tent. Washing in rivers. Not washing at all. Not paying rent. Remote freelance work. Radical? Ethical? Irrelevant? Extractive?

—

It’s another remote-work day, weeks on in this alternative cycling living/journey.

The ferry docking takes forever, and I stretch my laptop time as long as possible before packing up and heading down to the acrid car decks to collect my bike. The mix of metal and oil fumes are overwhelming. Finally I’m spat out alongside some other tourists and hundreds of Moroccan lorry drivers in Genova. Every passing vehicle blasts me with hot air as I ride up the motorway ramp to get out of the port and into the town to catch a train. En route I continue to check my phone for emails, maps, messages, and the clock as time counts down to my first meeting of the day strategically scheduled before my onwards train.

The station screens declare my train cancelled, and I wait in line until a helpful Trenitalia staff member rebooks my ticket on their tablet before I even make it to the desk. This now gives me forty-five minutes before I leave. An awkward amount of time. Not enough for that meeting. I drag my bike up stairs onto the platform, and sit on the floor opening my laptop. I ask my colleague to delay our meeting til this afternoon, feeling sweat dripping down my back and ever-unpredictable shove bike on train assault course imminent.

The train emerges. Laptop in bag, pick everything up, tense to spring, recognise a bike symbol on a carriage that passes, trot down the platform. I lunge in and mercifully there’s a bike slot and no one glowering at my grimy presence. Laptop back out. Thankfully some straightforward design tasks I can quickly pick up and put down. After transferring onto another train in Torino I get out at the end of the line in the foothills of the Alps. I beeline for the nearest café, intending to finalise work and meetings with overdue espresso. Hotspot reconnected. Promised work completed. Now to cycle two hours and nine-hundred meters up to where I’m staying.

Is this worth it? Am I having fun? Is fun the point?

Am I travelling or working or in the moment or just putting off inevitable stability in a system that demands it? Can living on a bike be sustainable or is it always a knife edge? It’s not you it’s me?

—

The vista opens up the higher we climb. Giant empty mountains. If this were still the Alps we’d be surrounded by caravans and day hikers with inappropriate footwear. But in the Agrafa area of the central Pindus range there is nothing but dead ends and 18º gradients. Sometimes paved, sometimes not, sometimes leading to a village, sometimes not.

I don’t have any work for the next five days, having sweated it out yesterday in an overheating Athens apartment. I’m just here. Just moving each day with a vague direction, consulting the map with my friend for which route we might take next. We roll over the top of the pass and down into another valley, braking to get off and walk sections from time to time when aggressive dogs jump out of the verge. I don’t know if there’s more adrenaline spurting out of their mouths our our ears. I feel scared and alive.

We stop at a water tap, the first in a while, and gulp greedily. There’s a grassy hollow behind the tap that I propose to stop at for the night, but she’s still got too many beans to cut the ride short. The end of day air is too sweet, too cool to resist pedalling a little further. The road starts to climb again, and rounding a bend the land on the right of the road suddenly drops off into nothingness. The view is flung wider than is comprehendible, the peaks around us cut sharply with golden light from the west. It seems miraculous, like a warm compress for tired eyes. For a moment it’s possible to immerse, feel my unsteady soul fed a morsel, glowing a little brighter, able to be in that moment without the usual constant internal critique that benefits no one. The rest of the world is infinitely present and nonexistent.

Beyond this vista, Athens is only a few hours train ride away. On the way there you pass Malakasa, a detention camp for people migrating through Greece, ringed with razor-wire. Upon reaching the city you could ride the the centre from the station along Archanon, over Vathy, through Omonia. You would see nodders slouched in doorways and in gutters, and flecks of blood and faeces on the pavement tiles, as well as slick bars and crisp hotel facades, some freshly sprayed in antifascist and anti-tourist slogans. From Athens ferries can deliver you to islands all over the Adriatic, the South-Western edges of some confiding a panorama of the Levantine coast, lit at night by the bombs pummelling occupied Palestine.