Hola! It’s been a while. Quite a while actually. I’m happy to report that I’m still alive and kicking, just a bit older and saltier… otherwise not much else has changed. Still wandering around, still making big travel plans, and still diverting wildly from them.

The only thing that seems to have changed is that I’ve become terribly lazy about writing any of it down. Well, I think I was always lazy about that, but I’ve become better at acting on my laziness 🤔🤷🏼

But I thought I would give a quick update on what I’ve been up to these last 6 years.

When I last left you, I was on the islands of Cabo Verde off the coast of West Africa, trying to hitchhike my way across the Atlantic Ocean on a sailboat.

Well, I made it!

After a lot of pestering yacht owners around the marina, I finally managed to secure a ride aboard a little 10m sailboat with a French captain. The crossing from Cabo Verde to the Caribbean island of Grenada took 25 days. Twenty-five days without seeing land, sharing a very small floating home with a somewhat eccentric, and rather OCD Frenchman.

The boat was pretty bare bones. No toilet, no refrigerator. (Somehow doesn’t surprise me that I ended up on a boat like that.) The captain was an interesting character, not always the easiest to get along with, and 25 days is a long time to spend in such close quarters with just one other person. But we survived each other, survived the Atlantic, and eventually made landfall in Grenada.

From there I eventually made my way to Guatemala, where I bought a shitty old Chinese motorcycle and started riding north towards the United States. Nothing like a good pandemic to crash some travel plans… this one arrived just as I was crossing the border into Mexico. It was not the ideal time to be rambling about, so I ended up abandoning the motorcycle somewhere in southern Mexico and continuing north by bus, managing to cross the border back into the US overland just as the world was descending into pandemic madness.

Not quite the ending I had imagined for that adventure, but c’est la vie

Since then there have been all sorts of other little adventures. A few trips to Mexico, Sri Lanka, Morocco, Egypt, an amazing journey through Oman, and plenty of wandering around Europe.

Which brings me to Tula.

A few summers ago I found myself in Barcelona, slowly melting in the summer heat, dreaming of cooler temperatures somewhere to the north. So one day, rather impulsively, I bought myself a 1993 Yamaha motorcycle for the princely sum of €800.

Tula was already a few decades old, and at that price I had no particularly grand expectations for his future. My thinking was pretty simple. I would point him north, ride until he died, and consider anything beyond France a bonus. Well, Tula has turned out to be quite a companion.

That first summer we made it all the way to Poland, where I left him in a friend’s barn and returned to Barcelona.

The following summer I came back, dusted him off, and we continued north through the Baltic countries, into Finland, across Sweden, and made it all the way into Norway, where I found a horse barn to leave him in for the winter.

The next summer I returned again and rode around Norway before heading south through Denmark and Germany, eventually finding some random guy in Hamburg who kindly agreed to let me leave Tula in his garage.

And there he sat. For two years.

This past summer, 2026, I finally returned to Hamburg, and was very pleased when Tula started right up! We rode through Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, and into Ukraine, where I spent most of my summer adventure time, before crossing into Romania.

Tula is now resting comfortably in yet another stranger’s garage, this time somewhere in northern Romania. It hasn’t all been smooth sailing… or riding. Of course there have been more than a handful of mechanical issues, and my cowboy mechanic skills, rusty as always, are often being put to the test. But Tula still keeps amazing me and I think he’s got some life left in him. Funny to think I originally imagined he might last me a few weeks and he has now carried me over 11,000km (7,000 miles) across a good chunk of Europe over several summers.

Next summer the plan is to pick him up and keep riding east and south, hopefully in the direction of Iraq.

Shit, I almost forgot about Bessie! That was another good story 😬

Apparently, my transatlantic hitchhiking experience had left me with the impression that I knew something about sailing. So at some point I flew to Florida and bought myself an old, rather shabby 8.5m (28ft) sailboat for $7,500.

Her name was Bessie.

Armed with a pretty modest amount of actual sailing experience and a some very undeserved confidence, I set off for the Bahamas.

The idea was simple enough. Buy a cheap boat, spend the winter sailing around the beautiful islands of the Bahamas instead of enduring another European winter, then sell the boat in the spring and return to Barcelona.

What could possibly go wrong?

For starters, I managed to hit a crab pot off the coast of Florida and bend my propeller, which turned into a twelve-day

ordeal trying to get it fixed, surrounded by some real Florida characters. Then there was the crossing of the Gulf Stream in less-than-ideal weather, with some rather tumultuous seas that had me perspiring a bit more than I care to admit.

And once I finally made it to the Bahamas, I discovered that some cabling in the mast had come loose, which meant the entire mast had to come down. This was accomplished with the help of a rather ragtag crew of assistants, mostly led by a crusty old guy who seemed to emerge from underneath a pile of rusting boat parts in the shipyard and promptly declared himself the resident expert in sailboat rigging. Somehow we got the mast down, fixed the problem, and put the whole thing back together again.

There were definitely moments during that adventure when I found myself wondering whether I had bitten off considerably more than I could chew. Being responsible for your own little floating home, particularly when you’re still figuring out how half of it works, has a way of exposing the gaps in your knowledge rather quickly.

But I learned an enormous amount, had some great experiences, and in the end managed to pull off the plan more or less as intended. I spent the winter exploring the Bahamas, sold the boat, and returned to Spain in the spring, a slightly more experienced sailor and with a few more stories to tell.

And that, I suppose, is the very condensed version of the last six years.

Of course many wonderful people were involved in some of these trips, some making brief cameos, others sharing full reckless responsibility…. many extraordinary landscapes, and some of my favorite memories are still those simple evenings spent wild camping. Finding a little clearing in a forest, a secluded spot beside a river, or some hillside overlooking a valley, setting up my tent, cooking a little dinner, sipping some red wine out of the bottle and hunting for shooting stars. (I counted over thirty one night this last summer in the mountains of Ukraine!)

I sometimes think I should make more of an effort to document all this. There are certainly enough stories. But somehow, when I’m not out traveling, life back in Barcelona has a way of filling up the days, and writing blog posts never quite makes it to the top of the list.

So for now you’ll have to make do with this rather abbreviated account.

As for what’s next? Well, there are plenty more ideas bouncing around in my head. I’m thinking of heading back to Latin America this winter, and of course there’s Tula waiting patiently in Romania but I have some much grander more challenging plans of the epic sort that I still would like to put into effect.

I have no idea what adventures the next few years will bring, but I rather like it that way.

Happy trails!