gypsy by trade | Ridin' bikes and travelin' light.

Three stories were first shared with friends and family via email, reprinted here as a vignette of touring life in Croatia and Bosnia. For the record, I don’t normally run into the police more than once in a week.
///Split, Croatia
“Don’t drink the water”, he says in English. “The fires,” he pauses, pointing to the nearby mountainsides which have burned in recent months, looking for the words. “The fires make the water bad”. His English is less accented than our own, speaking in...

Abe rides a macadam road above the sea on the Adriatic Crest Route in Croatia, a route mapped and published by Joe Cruz on Bikepacking.com.
The man uses both hands to carry the steel bucket out from his cramped home, which is half of the ground floor of some kind of outbuilding to the larger home on the property, which is shuttered for the season. We’ve asked him for water, but mostly we...

Arriving at the Czech border town of Český Tĕšín, Abe and I cross the river to Poland. A series of produce stalls are selling bulk potatoes along the road parallel the river, massive dried sunflowers and dill stalks accompany the display. We climb a...

Abe climbs a trail out of Špindlerův Mlýn, CZ crossing signed DH bike trails and chairlifts which won’t move for another couple months until the snow falls.
Following my first week on the 1000 Miles Adventure route where I traced the Czech-German border in alternating days of clouds and rain, I rested for several days in Liberec anticipating my friends Abe and Malcolm to arrive. Malcolm would only be in...