So what do some people do when they get divorced, turn forty, and acknowledge “a general disillusionment with life?”
Well, if you’re Guardian columnist Mike Carter, you flee London for a six month, 20,000 mile motorcycle jaunt across Europe.
A midlife crises has a number of outlets ranging from red sports cars to cheating spouses. Carter, however, picked one of the more healthy options for finding himself.
He wrote regularly about his experience traveling through 27 countries for his newspaper column, but now having returned has penned an engaging summary of his journey–the physical one and the internal one.
Carter is a witty and engaging writer who paints an intriguing portrait of his trip that is well worth reading. I was quite amused, for example, by his travel compass, often picking destinations simply because they had appealing-sounding names, such Ed, in Sweden. Other times, he claimed to “navigate by instinct.”
Traveling solo, he admits to developing an “unhealthy relationship” with his bike, often speaking to it tenderly and including it in many of his photos. He also includes a rather amusing list of statistics at the end of his article (Number of women he fell for: four. Number of people who fell for him: one. “A Turkish waiter called Hassan”).
“And the midlife crisis thing?” he writes. “Well, I think I’ve resolved many of those issues. Others are works in progress.” Welcome back to reality, Carter!