The Doorstep Mile

Never has the concept of the “doorstep mile” rang so true for me. The Scandinavians have a phrase the “doorstep mile”, meaning that the first mile away from your front door is the hardest of all. After more than 7 years of stating my intention to go on a very big bike ride it was finally happening.

Months of time to prepare dissolved into weeks, then weeks into days, days into hours. Despite having a good idea of when I would depart from Melbourne and for the first time in my adventuring life really making an effort to prepare in advance for the trip, I found myself quickly running out of time.

The last week in the lead up to my departure was nothing short of an emotional rollercoaster! So many beautiful moments, tearful “this is not goodbye, but see you laters” and hectic logistics as I packed my life in Melbourne into boxes and compressed what remained into the bags that I would fit to my bike.

I spent my last morning in Melbourne with some of the very lovely and important people in my life at Coffee Outside (https://www.instagram.com/coffeeoutsidenaarm/ every Friday morning at 7:30am, all welcome – get amongst it!) in the middle of Royal Park’s native grass circle. With some literally last minute bike logistics (one of my primary bike bags came off a flight from Los Angeles at 6am that morning – a story for another time), it was time to finally hit the road.

I headed west out of Melbourne, past my parent’s house in Altona and out towards the You Yangs Regional Park. The bike felt heavy, very heavy and I puzzled as to whether I’d taken too much or not enough. Plenty of time to work that out on the road – I expect to be in Australia until October as I make my way on a fairly indirect route to Darwin (see my About page for the approximate route) I had my first beer of the trip by a warm fire before riding into the dark towards camp. I had done it, it felt good to have taken that first step out my front door and finally be on the road!