Today is officially the half way mark of this trip. We’re now sitting in a room in a hostel in Sarajevo looking over the mountains. Iceland now feels like a distant memory, it feels like we’ve been biking forever, and it’s difficult imagine doing anything else. God only knows how we’ll return to our normal lives at the end of this.

So far we’ve biked over 4000 km and travelled through 10 countries. I’ve no idea how much climbing we’ve done, but in the last three days alone we’ve ascended over 2000 metres. We’ve spent, on average, about 4 hours on the bike per day – which adds up to a paltry 300 odd hours. This seems absurd to us – the maths feels impossibly, ridiculously wrong and I’ve had to check my calculations over and again. Surely we’ve done more than this? On some days alone it feels like we’ve been on the bikes for more than 300 hours!

We’ve battled rain, wind and cold on many occasions, but the many stunning and glorious days of cycling have more than offset the bad ones (some of the cold and wet days have also been stunning and glorious!).

We’ve seen an almost ridiculous amount of change over the course of the journey so far. The first world conditions in Iceland, Denmark, Germany and Austria have slowly given way as we’ve headed south. The drivers have become more erratic, the roads less pristine, the bikeways have evaporated and roadside rubbish has become more prevalent. Of course, things have also got considerably cheaper, it’s becoming more and more interesting, and we’ve found the people to be nicer and nicer (this may be because they are so much more unused to seeing cyclists).

While we’ve done a bit of free camping, either out of necessity, or because the settings were too good not too, we’ve done a lot less than we had originally planned. This mainly due to the fact that we’re a lot less hard and our expectations are higher than we thought they would be. Finding somewhere to free camp at the end of the day that is either reasonably nice, or not someone’s backyard, is difficult and can turn a hard day’s cycling into a nightmare, and we’ve generally avoided it.

That being said, most of our favourite camping has been unpaid, and the best of all was free camping in the Bosnian highlands, with absolutely stunning views and a complete feeling of wildness.

By Australian standards we’ve been cold. A lot. Iceland was never going to be warm, but we’ve been a little surprised how consistently cold it was through much of Europe. It has really toughened us up, and we’re finding ourselves walking around in t-shirts when other tourists are rugged up under multiple layers of jumpers and jackets.

We’ve also found that we much prefer the cold to cycle in. We’re now start sweating profusely and feeling heat stroked as soon as the temperature climbs near 20 degrees! Of course this is much less likely to be a problem for us for the next few months.

We’ve also been tired. In some ways this had been really good. There’s nothing quite like a rigorous all day lugging a 40 kg touring bike over a mountain pass to cure insomnia! This means for me that I’ve slept better than I have in years.

The tiredness has also seriously tested us out on occasion. At times we’ve struggled to make the simplest decisions, and have found ourselves fighting over the stupidest little things (my favourite was the blazing row we had over how we should store our pasta dregs!). Ally in particular struggled with fitness when we first started (despite our best intentions, we never really found time to do much training prior to the trip), but is now light years fitter and more able to cope with the daily grind of cycle touring. I started with still swollen and painful joints from Ross River fever, but this too has got much better (long downhills with a lot of braking is still painful but the discovery of Voltarin has been a life saver). We’ve also got much better at dealing with uncertainty, and have become much more capable of dealing with days where the world throws us a curve ball – a no mean feat for control freaks like us!

We’ve seen no shortage of spectacular scenery. From towering, mind numbingly large glaciers in Iceland, incredible mediaeval cities in Bavaria and Austria, the beautiful Italian Alps, the spectacular azure coast in Croatia and the rugged highlands of Bosnia.

In amongst the spectacular scenery we’ve seen some really sobering reminders of how things can go so wrong. We’ve stood on little visited and forgotten concentration camps in Germany, witnessed the streams of refugees making their way into Europe escaping the strife in Syria, wandered around the Stasi complex in Berlin, and seen the very raw war wounds still present all over Bosnia (think bullet riddled buildings, half destroyed buildings and live mine fields).

We’re still not sure where we’re heading next. We have a rough plan to cycle into Dumitor National Park in Montenegro (we’re a little worried about how cold it might be, and what accomodation options there are) and then down to the Bay of Kotor. We’ve heard Albania is really amazing and it’s now on on our list too. As we’ve grown more confident we’re also starting to consider cycling to Istanbul. I’ll guess we’ll see over the next three and a half months!