EL CAMINO DE SANTIAGO or El Pedaleo in my case

EL CAMINO DE SANTIAGO

or El Pedaleo in my case

As any good story goes, it all started while couch surfing in the Netherlands back in the summer of ‘14. I had already been to Barcelona once by this point, knew that I wanted to go back, and was becoming increasingly set on the idea of doing a long-distance bike trip. Like, super long distance. I had toyed with the idea of doing a Barcelona-Rome, or even a China-Portugal just to stretch my imagination. Of course, neither of these came into reality, nor have I actually biked more than three consecutive days in a row, but they got as far as my thought life.

Regardless, as it happens, I was hosted by a girl who was just settling in after a long ride across Spain – Barcelona to Santiago de Compostela. With the idea of long distance bike rides already in my head as well as my affinity for the country itself, my curiosity was piqued, and I can surely attribute my motivation in this journey to learning of Renate’s strong-willed endeavour.

Whether one is completing El Camino from France or from Portugal, for religious or personal reasons, by foot or by wheels, it seemed to me like a super interesting challenge, and I committed to trying it out one day. I’m not sure if “trying it out” is the best attitude to go about something like this, but a year later, I finally found myself back in Spain on that 3 month stint I mentioned in the last post. I was fully intent on making the two-week, two-wheeled voyage to the west coast – 1,167 km, or something like that. How hard could it be?

Yeah… I never got around to it. I couldn’t even get myself to leave the city for longer than 3 or 4 days at a time during those 3 months. I was seriously in love.

At the same time, I was also trying to figure out how to make this trip into something more collaborative, more explorative, more than just myself; and that’s where The Nomad Barista comes in. El Camino extends as TNB’s latest project with the goal to discover the impact of coffee in local communities across Spain as well as showcase how good coffee can be brewed nomadically anywhere as long as accompanied by a bit of creativity and a desire to continue pushing the boundaries of coffee convention.

I’ve been fortunate enough to be working with two lead partners on the project so far, La Fabrica Coffee Roasters in Girona, Catalonia, and Mango Bikes in Bristol, England, whom I’ll be introducing more in depth in the following posts.

In the meantime, stay tuned on Instagram, and if you have any insights on this bike trek, any bike trek, or specific coffee spots or people I should visit between Barcelona and Santiago, let me know!

Projected Departure: October 18, 2016

Ciao for now,

FOOTNOTES

La Fabrica: www.lafabrica.cc / Mango Bikes: www.mangobikes.com