Welcome! We’re Julie and Mark, a couple in our mid 40s. In May 2016 we quit our day-to-day lives to ride our bikes through Europe. Follow along on our epic journey of self-discovery and cultural exploration – mostly as experienced through the cyclist’s insatiable hunger for gelato and chocolate!
Since we took six months to pedal around Europe, and we rode relatively few kilometers each day, we named ourselves Team Lumaca, ‘lumaca’ meaning ‘snail’ in Italian. Since we’re riding so slowly, we thought that was àpropos.
We originally thought we’d take the scenic route from Denmark (Mark’s ancestry) to southern Italy (Julie’s ancestry), but plans have a way of changing. Instead, visa issues compelled us to start our tour in France, and record rains blew us further off course. So, we mostly made up our route as we went along.
Start at the beginning here, with an explanation of why we wanted to cycle tour, or click on a link to the right to join us en route.