Seven rides. Six of them are the apprenticeship, and one of them is the reason for all the others.
The plan is not to spend the next two years waiting.
Every ride below is a real journey with a real destination, filmed as its own short season. They get progressively harder: a course, then a day trip, then a week, then a border, then a continent.
By the time I point the bike east for the last one, nothing about it should be new except the landscape. That is the whole idea, and it is the part most people skip.
Most schools hand you a light, forgiving machine. I'm learning on the 1992 Dominator I'll actually ride, loaded and heavier than anything they'd lend me. Standing, braking on loose ground, and picking it up alone. The least glamorous episode, and the one everything after it rests on.
Two hundred kilometres south, a Bronze Age tower ten metres high standing over a well sunk sixteen metres to the water table. Built between 2200 and 1500 BC, during the drought that helped bring down the Akkadian empire and Egypt's Old Kingdom. The oldest groundwater system in Iberia, and nothing else in Europe is shaped like it.
A hundred and seventy-four thousand hectares of canyon between Guadalajara and Cuenca. It is the deepest river gorge system in Spain, cut by the Tagus, the same river that runs on through Toledo to the Atlantic. Forty villages inside its boundary, two hours from my door.
Menga is the only dolmen in continental Europe built to face a mountain shaped like a sleeping man, and its neighbour El Romeral turns west to El Torcal instead. Then east to Los Millares: a walled town of a thousand people with three rings of defences and eighty tombs, standing before the pyramids at Giza. Ends in the Almería desert.
A twenty-one metre engraved gallery under a mound in Huelva. A Tartessian sanctuary in Extremadura, from a civilisation that vanished. And across the border near Évora, the Almendres Cromlech: ninety-five standing stones raised in three phases from the sixth millennium BC, roughly two thousand years before Stonehenge, and nobody knows what for.
North to Burgos and a different order of time altogether. Not centuries or millennia but hundreds of thousands of years, and the fossils that rewrote where Europeans came from.
The Balkans, Türkiye, the Caucasus, the Caspian, Samarkand, the Pamir Highway, and the steppe where the empire that once held all of it began. Everything before this is the apprenticeship. This is where the road actually starts.
Following the oldest things people ever built.
The route to Mongolia runs through the wreckage of nearly every empire on this landmass, and past a string of sites that are older or stranger than the schoolbook version admits. Göbekli Tepe. Derinkuyu. Gobustan. The deer stones of the Khangai.
Two things currently stand in the way, and I would rather say so now than discover them too late: Azerbaijan has kept its land borders shut to arriving travellers since 2020, and Mongolia touches only Russia and China.
