🇫🇷 Canal du Midi - Biking Across France - 09.26.2018

The Canal du Midi is a 240 km (150 mi) long, 17th-century man-made waterway in southern France, connecting Toulouse to the Mediterranean Sea, and is part of the larger Canal des Deux Mers network linking the Atlantic and Mediterranean. A UNESCO World Heritage site, it's a marvel of engineering featuring locks, aqueducts, and bridges, built by Pierre-Paul Riquet to facilitate trade and now a popular destination for leisure boating, cycling, and tourism through scenic landscape - Wiki

It took seven days to bike… on a shitty bicycle… across Southern France. It was painful… physically and mentally. Would I do it again? The romantic fantasy, yes! Reality… fuck no!!!

I’ve had great travel companions, good travel companions, ambivalent, boring, controlling, fun, easy going… all types of companions… but this trip… this companion was the worst… and I would later find this to be the reason I prefer to travel alone.

I’ve been reluctant to write this story… because this amazing experience was soured by a dead-fish travel partner… that did not want to participate in anything… I mean… one single thing… no shopping, no decisions , no prep, no phone calls, no directions… even a child can answer a question of what they would like… She would be better off going on a tour. A cruise.

Well… we live… we learn… and I enjoy company in life… so I continue to travel with others… and I take the good with the rough… and I understand my own responsibilities in partnership… good and bad.

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I wasn’t working at the time… and had much freedom… and I considered staying in Europe… but I was strapped for money… and I couldn’t be there much longer than planned. I finished the trip in Barcelona and renting a motorcycle for a charity ride they do across the world.