As I’ve been going on this bike trip, up until now, I haven’t technically visited any country that I hadn’t visited before. I actually lived in Germany for five years. Concerning the other countries on the trip, England, Belgium, France, and Austria, I have had very cursory experience.
I took a trip to London with my mom and stepdad when I was twelve for two weeks. On a driving tour with my dad in 1997 we stopped in Brussels for a couple of hours. In Austria, I was only there one time when I was driving to Prague at the end of 1995 with a friend who was visiting from the USA, Alex Hontchar. We got lost in a blizzard on the way and found at one point that we were taking my 1984 1.1 liter Ford Fiesta through a whiteout somewhere in Austria. Somehow we didn’t die and made it to Prague. We really don’t know where where we were. We couldn’t distinguish the ground from the sky. I spent a couple of days in Calais on this trip, but my experience with France was somewhat more than these other countries, though of course less than Germany. I had a girlfriend in Cluse, near Geneva, and I would visit her with her family in Lions whenever possible, a couple of times per month, until we broke up because things were going too fast for me.
But on this trip, I only spent all of one night in one country that I hadn’t been to at all in my earlier life. I’m nearing the end of the trip now, writing from Malgrat Del Mar in Spain. I’m exhausted and trying to shake off some of the demons I’ve collected along the way. I had wanted to end this trip in Greece, hopefully with a plane ticket to Israel, but Israeli bureaucracy is ruining everything it possibly can, and with a skill that can only be explained by the supernatural. More on that later. I’ll just say I was wanting to choose between heading to Greece via Slovenia and Croatia or Romania and Bulgaria, but in Budapest things got out of control on multiple fronts, and the Israelis were causing so many difficulties that I had to call the trip quits from Hungary and head to Barcelona to catch my ship back the USA for my family reunion, get my credit cards back, my US phone number turned back on, and jump through whatever other hoops the Israelis were going to put me through.
Now I had spent some time in Budapest before in the 90s as well, so Hungary also counts as a country that I had been to before. On the way to Budapest I was going to spend one evening in Bratislava, in Slovakia, though, and that one overnighter in Slovakia, basically a pit stop, will be the only country that I hadn’t been to at all. I did have an unusual experience there, but really, the most interesting thing for me about Slovakia was the ride in to Bratislava from Vienna. So I guess this will actually be something of a bicycle tour post, though there will be a lot going along with that. Here is the Strava link to the ride.
If you take a look at the map, you’ll see a little detour that I had to take. I plan all my routes on Garmin and take every effort to stick to the little red line on my cycling computer whenever possible, but on this sunny day, that wasn’t going to be an option. The rural roads between Austria and Slovakia were closed off due to concerns about transmission of animal diseases, and neither I nor Garmin knew anything about that when I was planning the route to Bratislava.
I was absolutely deflated. This would mean that I would have to pull over on the side of the road with my Galaxy S25 Ultra with S-Pen and cycling computer and plan some other route. In the middle of nowhere. Signal was sure to be weak. And you know my problem with technodemons. Electronics just don’t work for me, and everything I do with electronics involves twice as much time as it should and often a few swear words. This would surely result in a brain-popping embolism out there by myself in the woods. God shined his light on me, though, and sent this solo cyclist some aid in the form of an actual human element.
Just as I was lamenting my future of throwing my phone into the woods in frustration while shaking my fist at God over some technical difficulty in route planning, some other cyclists would show up and found themselves in exactly the same dilemma. Tomas on the left would talk with us a bit and go his own way, but I latched on to Anna and Julia on the left for my salvation. They too were going to Bratislava, and I would just hitch a ride with the girls. After all, Luara (Frankfurt),
Hilary (Mannheim),
the Holy Princess Neta and the lovely younglies of Strasbourg,
and Gigidudu of Vienna (who I didn’t get a picture of), had shown me that my traumas of the past could be overcome, and that life with the ladies was doable after all. So I decided to tag along with these cycling chicks. Really, I would have followed any old man on a lawnmower to Bratislava if I could avoid having to re-plan a route with Garmin on the side of the road.
These chicks were super cool. And they were fast. But not the bad kind. It may not be a common phrase anymore, but in the middle of the twentieth century, the term “fast girl” meant “slut.” That’s not what I mean, though. I’m a cyclist. They are cyclists. And they cruise fast. 20 mph on flats.
Now I’ll also say that that I still had some of that HHC left that I’d gotten in Vienna to combat the soul-destroying inflammation of the 140-mile marathon ride into that city in order to mail documents to the Jewish Agency. For those who aren’t going to read that last post, HHC is a mildly psychoactive cannabinoid that you can get over the counter in several countries in Europe. That is, it has a number of the benefits of THC and CBD, but while THC gets you high like a street drug, and CBD doesn’t get you high at all, HHC has a mildly tranquilizing effect. You could say it gets you “not quite stoned” or “stoned, but just barely” or something like that. So I myself was a bit open, relaxed, and childlike on this ride, but looking back on things, I think I was something of a little boy who had stumbled into a world of adults, and that world may not have been the best place for a child like me.
So to start with, none of us knew where we were going. We were medieval with the technology…as in…there was none. We were just looking at the hills and the trees and the sun and the houses off in the distance and getting the idea that “Bratislava was that way…” For my part, I wasn’t going to pretend for a second to be any kind of DC Superhero…I was going to go exactly where mommies went. That’s about the extent of my thinking, except that over the course of the ride I began to be more and more fascinated with these people with whom I was sharing the road.
In spite of my simpleton attitude, the complex interpersonal dynamics started even before we mounted our bikes. You can tell from the picture above that the blonde, Anna, was the more outgoing of the pair, with her posing for me when I asked for a picture of my two Valkyrie deliverers to a new promised land. Anna was German. Julia, the brunette, was an American living long term in Vienna. Anna was wearing purple. Water mixed with blood. Instantiation of passion. The color of the walls of the Mishkan…the Tabernacle. Julia was in black, the color of sackcloth and ash. Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox Christian priests, as well as Haredi rabbis and all devoted adherents of the Jewish Orthodox traditions wear black because this is the color of repentance…and the emptying of self, absorbent of light…truth. I noted that Julia was wearing a white hat like the good guy cowboys of the old westerns.
Julia was also the brunette of the troupe, with arms of orange fire peeking around the corner of her cycling jersey. So I was being guided to the Zion of the day by the standard dichotomy of blonde and brunette, and their clothes matched the stereotypes. Further, Anna’s outfit was branded by Canyon bicycles, and Julia was actually riding a Canyon bicycle. Carl Jung, or Abraham Abulafia, would tell me that I would need to put a lid on the observation of this synchronistic event. In the world of blondes vs. brunettes, the blonde gets all the attention, but the brunette has what you’re looking for under the hood. Or so they say.
While riding I wanted to get to know these new potential friends. I was feeling like back in California on those giant rides with Rapha Cycling Club with dozens of people. As the girls rode, they’d call “HOLE!” when they saw an obstruction in the road, just like the ride leaders in the California cycling groups. I’d ridden a thousand miles across Europe basically by myself. Yeah, I crossed that giant construction site with David between Aachen and Bonn.
I don’t think I put that in a blog anywhere. And I got to ride a while with Manfred. He was like me, a dinosaur even older than I with only paper maps to guide him along. I don’t have his number or social media because he isn’t on social media. I only have this one picture.
But other than these rides of a few hours or so, I’d basically been riding by myself. So when these chicks with their jerseys, cycling shorts, tri-bolt cleated riding shoes, and two water bottle setups on legit road bikes showed up, it really did feel just like I was riding around Palos Verdes or the Hollywood Hills. There is a point to this observation: I was going to the one place I had never been, and I was going there with complete strangers, but I was taking a lot of my past with me. And remember, these were real, actual GIRLS. I have had a traumatic history with those.
Now while I personally would say that everything on this ride was cool right up until the very end, little bits of weird started to creep in almost from the start. First off, the extroverted and outgoing blonde of course had the idea to stop and ask for directions, which she did, though she commented to Julia and I to just go on without her. I don’t know about you, but if I am stopping to get directions, that makes me the one who has the best idea where we are going, so I would be the least likely to tell everyone to just leave without me.
Now also, I can’t remember the exact context, just that it was earlier in the ride, but I remember Anna more or less telling me flat out to talk to Julia, kind of shewing me away. I started to think that there was the possibility that I was falling into some kind of guy/girl dynamic. That is, the blonde likely got more attention from the guys than the brunette, and the blonde was likely to be annoyed by male attention where the brunette would be more likely to be flattered by it. So after being verbally guided to talk to Julia and the bizarre circumstance of the one getting directions telling the group to leave her behind, I got some sense that as much as I wanted to escape gender-based garbage, it was coming with me. And from chicks who reminded me of California girls, with whom I have a bad history, and of whom I do not have good memories.
I’m not sure if these girls knew I had to be at least twenty years older than them, probably closer to thirty, but even if they did, the knowledge wouldn’t prevent them from seeing me as a sex object, I suppose. In fact it might just cause them to see me as a less desirable sex object. But who knows how old they thought I was with helmet and glasses on. I likely made some comment about Europe in the nineties, so it’s likely they had an idea about my age, but I don’t remember.
Now they certainly don’t know about how women gave me post-traumatic stress disorder, that I consider myself something of a gynophobe, and that I have a rule not to date anyone until they’ve been my friend for a year. I don’t have that embossed on any team-shirts. So the likelihood that I was being pushed by the blonde to the brunette out of gender-based social dynamics was real.
The course of the interaction steered me in directions that conflicted with what I perceived theirs to be, however. In talking to them and getting to know them, I found that Julia the brunette was an English teacher. I’m quite familiar with that. I have been an English teacher myself in life. The fact of her English-teacher-hood wasn’t supremely intriguing. But when I went to ask the blonde what she did, she said that she was studying geography, but wasn’t very good at it. This intrigued me completely because in the USA we don’t even bother to teach geography anymore. If you want to know where something is, there’s Google Maps.
Of course I was fascinated with finding out what there was to this field, and she gave a bit of explanation that it has relevance to environmentalism, urban planning, etc. This reminded me once of a conversation at a bar I had with a professor of accounting many years back. We tend to think accounting isn’t that interesting in general, and that those who do it basically work with spreadsheets and calculators to balance books, but that there really isn’t that much cerebral to it. But I talked with the guy about how the organization, presentation, and scheduling the release of accounting data can move markets, cause lawsuits, send people to jail, affect profitability, and myriad other factors. I never had such a fascinating conversation about accounting. Now I didn’t get into that kind of a conversation about geography, but I really was piqued that Europe had such a different view of the subject. And I was more than slightly captivated by her studying it but not being good at it.
That conversation was actually intertwined with the fact that I was telling her she was getting us to Bratislava like a pro ride leader, while she was lamenting that she had no earthly idea where we were going, which put me into something like the encouraging uncle role or some other kind of trope of guys who want to endear themselves to women by encouraging them to overcome their insecurities. I found myself praising the navigation skills of someone who was literally formally educated in the science of where things are, and who was leading Julia and me to this undiscovered country, but who all the while felt like she had no idea where she was going.
I’m telling you, I was just exhausted from Vienna, slightly stoned, and delighted to be taken to Bratislava by some new friends, but although I was in a completely new country, and with completely new people, I was bringing in a lot of my negative preconceptions based on past behavior, taking that to my understanding of these girls’ behaviors, and to this day I can’t quite say I think I was wrong.
Some guys can just run up to a group of strangers of whatever gender and just have a good time. But not OG. Not me. There always has to be some kind of gender-based slant to things. I’m not saying it’s always bad. But most guys complain about getting stuck in the friend zone, while that’s the only place I ever want to be. But my age and gender always amount to some kind of a factor, and while sometimes that’s a good thing, it’s quite often not, and these California cycling chicks who were not from California seemed to be connected to the bad of it all.
At one point we stopped, and Anna took a picture of something, and I pulled out my phone to take a picture as well, but then thought they’d think I was weird for snapping more pictures of them, so I turned and took a photo of…a construction site. Right then Anna said, “this is weird!” and headed back to her bike. That was mildly triggering because I actually am weird, and women have ruined my life a couple of times for being weird, so I tend not to react well to those words, which women tend to say a lot.
From that point there wasn’t so much talking because the road was trafficky, and we were forced to ride single file. I remember trying to ride beside Julia and talk to her, giving Anna her space, but I really couldn’t pull it off without splattering onto the windshield of an approaching car, so that ended up pretty much being it for the conversation for the rest of the ride.
Luckily we finally made it to Bratislava. We stopped and took pictures from a bridge.
Now as a hospitable and chivalrous Texan determined to overcome all reservations about women, I offered to buy the two lunch as thanks for guiding me in. They didn’t accept. They also didn’t politely evade by telling me they were in a hurry or anything. They flat out told me they wanted to have a girls’ lunch, that they would follow me on Strava, and bye.
I guess it went worse than even I thought it did.
So, let me make some observations. On this trip, thus far, I have had the best times in the places with which I have been the least familiar. Yes, this has coincided with my being less encumbered by the hassle of Israeli bureaucratic insanity in those places, but nevertheless, if there had been a theme to the trip so far, just forgetting about old traumas to escape to new places would have been the message. Here, though, I was going to the newest place I would go on this trip, but familiarities, prejudices, and patterns from my past seemed to manifest in the present in order to drag my past along with me, and from what I see now, that was not ONLY a matter of my perceptive bias. They really did act in ways that coincided with patterns of behavior from my past. So then, from this we can learn that the past is not an easy thing to escape. You’ve got to get rid of everything on the inside, but you’re going to want to get rid of everything on the outside as well, if you truly want to escape your past. So then, when growing, it may be a better idea to confront your past than to try to escape it.
And now for a little synchronistic event to cap it all off. I stopped first in the magnificent city for some food. By myself, alone, not as I wanted to be, but I couldn’t help but to enjoy the meal. How could I not, eating at the gorgeous café below?
After that, though, I headed to the hostel. What happened next would blow my mind. As I was checking in to what had to be my fiftieth hostel on this trip, the girl at the desk took my passport, and upon viewing, told me I was too old to stay there. I’m not kidding. It’s almost like the bad ending of the ride with the young chicks rippled through space and time to create a kind of flavor of the day, and today’s flavor was: “Bailey the unwanted old man” which resulted in my having to get out the exact same app I used to get that hostel in order to procure another one, which I did.
That app, Hostelworld, has my age information. Any hostel with age restrictions can use that information to ensure I don’t make a reservation in the first place. So the app did something poorly, or the hostel did something poorly, or some angels or demons or rogue AI or something somewhere somehow just made it so that today of all days I would just get hit with “uncool old guy juice.” And you tell me there is no God, and no Satan, pulling the strings here? This just cannot be random chance.
I guess if I tell you anything here, whether it be about cycling, or about my psychology, or whatever sociology statement this strange gender-based interaction may tell you, there is one thing that is absolutely indisputable: This cannot be random chance.
So I went to a hostel down the road using the same app, went to bed, and rode into Hungary the next morning. As I was checking out of the hostel the employee turned her back to me, and I was able to get a pic of the back of her t-shirt. That pic of the back of her t-shirt is the image at the top of this post. You know my thing with smiley faces. Can that t-shirt be random chance?