We have reached a peculiar point - the point where, having overcome wind, rain, hail, mountains, heat, dry, fog, floods, storms, language barriers, and all other manner of external obstacle, we find that the greatest obstacle is within. They call it being homesick, but it is not exactly that; it is an irrepressible desire to be done with the whole thing, to cash in our chips, to ride into Istanbul and gorge on döner and figs until our flight rolls down the tarmac on Nov. 23, to bring a much-needed end to this life of constant moving and meeting and biking and reflecting. There is a danger to setting goals: when they have driven you for so long, their absence renders you listless. Maybe it is suitable that this is where the final obstacle lies. After all, this is what we wanted out of the whole thing, or at least a sizeable chunk of what we wanted - one last pre-life stab at the pause-and-reflect gambit, a bit more time to introspect. What centers all this? What have we learned? What do we know now, and what do we know we don't know? Questions multiply like the mosquitoes that perversely continue on into late fall, pestering us as we go through the camp-setting motions each evening.
The road is just a road, the bike just a bike. 10 000 km isn't the point, no more than the cycling and the athletic prowess it brings; that will only get you a slight gut and a pair of absurdly powerful calves. 10 000 km is just a number, a round figure. Why not 6 758 km? As we arrive in Thessaloniki and poke about the Rotonda in search of our CouchSurfing host, a German nicknamed Asterix stops us - he is a fellow bike tourist; a metalworker, carpenter, and shoemaker by trade who, having completed precisely that distance, had his bike stolen by Thessaloniki junkies looking for cheap thrills. The first thing you notice about Thessaloniki is that it isn't Athens or Kalamata; it lacks both the cosmopolitan anonymity of the former and the quaint large-town-bordering-on-small-city vibe of the latter. It is somewhere in between, a land of apartments mostly ignored by the mainstream tourism industry - and for this reason exactly, it is a place preserved from the worst excesses of that industry, a place where the locals mostly go about their lives unmolested. The anarchists and punks and the like congregate at the Rotonda, the students near the university, and the rest live out their costume-and-tie subsistence in the bosom of urbanity...
What about the day? Not much to say there: we leave Katerini early, try to avoid the motorway but merely end up marooned on farmland backroads dodging precariously large patches of mud, give in and opt for the smaller route up through Alexandria, hit rain for the first time in a week, ride along boring flat road for what seems like six eternities before finally hitting the periphery of Thessaloniki, fight our way along the now-routine inner-city double-carriageway madness, find the railway station, call our host, find our host, get waylaid by the friendly German, talk for some time about travel and cycling and the importance of people and his dog and various tricks for setting fire without petrol and the like, take our leave, find the building, ring several times to no effect, are admitted anyways when Stelios sees us from the balcony, park our bikes inside, drag anything we need upstairs, make our introductions, pop out to the nearest supermarket for dinner ingredients, cook, drink, eat, and sleep.
But: we are nearly there. We have resolved absolutely to take the train to Alexandropouli, thereby saving ourselves 300km of cycling. The rest is simple: 300km more from Alexandropouli to Istanbul over more than a week.
Wow. It's almost over. That hasn't really sunk in yet.
For now, though, another relatively uneventful day in a time when we are glad to have every day less eventful than the last. Tomorrow promises more rest in Thessaloniki - we will spend one or two days here before our train out, enough to recover our strength for the last haul!