Home is a strange place. After cycling for weeks, I return home with some kind of sadness. After taking off and cycling into an epic journey across half the continent and dreaming of so many adventures and wonderous possibilities, arriving back at the odd place you call home is like returning where you once started. A looping state of mind. As if it is the same all over. Cycling in cycles. Though life hasn’t waited, all the old clutter still remains as it always was. Work and all the other things in life you can’t escape.

So home again you have to go. And it is a fortune to have a home. But after such a long journey it looks different. There are little dusty ghosts of abandonment luring in corners of the rooms, as if you would have never returned. Still there is a new shine to everything, as you look on your usual place with different eyes. Returning home gives you strange perspectives on life. Clocks definitely have a different pace. Home is just another place you are passing through.

People at Krankenhaus and en route always ask, how many days, how many weeks and miles and kilometres. So here are the stats for this year: 21 days and 1419 kilometres of cycling to Krankenhaus and back again.

Time and space move differently while cycling long distance. After two or three days on the road, I more or less lose connection to my everyday life. Long distance pedalers joke about the monotonous rhythm of it all: Cycle! Eat! Sleep! All three definitely become important parts of life while cycling to Krankenhaus. Sometimes after a really long ride, there is nothing more to be done than pitch up your tent, cook some pasta and fall asleep. Exhaustion is a good companion of cycling long distance.

Journeying by bicycle lets time shift and spaces slide. Sometimes you can’t help it. My plan for that day was in ruins. Though everything started so wonderful on one of England’s most beautiful cycle paths, the Tissington Trail. The old railway track winds northwards from Ashbourne to Buxton, right into the heart of the Peak District. The last miles of the tracks into Buxton are still in use. So you have to take minor roads eventually and get some climbs again, before descending into the beautiful market town. But up to Dowlow Quarry it is miles and miles of easy cycling in the Peaks and gorgeous views all around. No steep inclines, no road crossings, just what I came for.

And the weather is bright and warm. So I roll into Buxton, find a nice cafe for tea and sandwiches to celebrate a proper lunch break. And off I go again on a high note, absolutely confident to arrive at my host’s place for the night in the afternoon. Up some incline out of Buxton, down into Whaley Bridge, and up again, and down again, getting more and more exhausted on some minor road to New Mills, slower and slower crawling along the Pennine Cycle route.

Time stretches out once more and warps weirdly. Clouds and occasional showers move in from the West. Moors looming to my right, while I make it to Glossop and Hadfield eventually. Though it is already late afternoon, I am a bit more confindent again. Another cycle path on a former railway track will make the last miles east easy enough. Until there is a tunnel and the entrance is cosed and pad-locked. So up I go some really strange path after crossing the busy A road…

Hours later I am up on the moors. The clouds have settled low over the lonely stretch of hills, the cycle path is only some track, sheeps staring at me left and right. At some point I put on my rain clothes. The clock seems to run faster and faster. Already past eight o’clock and slowly the light is fading. At some point I consider to put up my tent in a deserted valley. But there isn’t much water left in my bottles, so I scrap the idea and cycle on up and down and up and down the moors, very slowly on the rough track. Finally I make it to a reservoir and a tarmaced road eventually. Only two miles left to go. A final downhill roll into the village ahead.

My hosts David and Monique put the kettle on, when I arrive past nine that evening. They conjure up some left over dinner for me, which is one of the most delicious meals I ever tasted. After a hot shower I feel like a king. Later we sit in the living room. They are watching some a decisive Brexit debate on TV. They have voted against leaving the EU. It’s early days of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. We laugh about him.

Afterwards we settle for a last drink. We talk about my travel plans and Krankenhaus, listen to some Sea Power. David and Monique don’t know them. David is a Yorkshire man and long time New Model Army fan and delighted to hear I like them too. We talk about their new album “From here”. It is my frist night in Yorkshire and David tells me about the green and grey I have seen myself that day up on the moors. As tired as I am, we sit up quite late. Or maybe not. Time plays these tricks. Green and grey meander into my vivid dreams that night under rain ladden Yorkshire skies. I only make it some 15 miles to Hebden Bridge the next day. It feels like crossing half the UK.

A year later I send a postcard to David and Monique from Freiburg. No chance to return to the UK that summer, I cycle long distance in Southern Germany. It is that strange summer of 2020. But memories of that first Krankenhaus still linger. Everyone hopes against hope Covid won’t get that bad. I want to say thank you for their hospitality and this special evening. I don’t know if it ever was posted to them. Maybe they moved to some other place. I never find them on the cycle network again, where I conctacted them in 2019. If you by chance know them, please say hello.

People appear out of the blue en route. You sometimes wonder if they really exist. In all these strange hours that stretch and falter into grey tarmacked roads along green valleys, it is often hard to tell, what is real and what not. Travelling slow you have another perception of the world around you.

We are so used to go fast, by car, by train, by plane. I have to learn going slow, enquire sudden possibities of space and time couverture while cycling my way at the speed of always being late. I had to learn how plans go awry and still work out eventually, but always different, at some other place and time as estimated. Once you learn to go with these strange tides of time and space you earn vast skies and distance horizonts of another world that is right there in front you. But you have to discover it, open up to it all. Strange places are always around. You have to come home to them.

So it is not about counting miles and days, kilometres or hours. There is some other measurement at work. And the farther you cycle, the more chances open up to go slow in hope of finding differences, that keep us all together somehow. Small things and gestures mostly count for more then the big pictures. It is only what has lost can be found. Though sometimes it is not the same what you find. Maybe it never is the same. And so home I return, changed ever and ever more. And home changes too again and again.

Christoph x