Nearly a month into the coronavirus lockdown, Kleon Papadimitriou, a Greek student in Aberdeen, Scotland, was feeling homesick. His father joked that he could simply walk, and a light bulb went on. What if he cycled?
What followed was a cycling journey across Europe that spanned more than 2000 miles and 48 days, with Papadimitriou finally arriving home in Athens late last month.
Papadimitriou, 20, studies electrical and electronic engineering at the University of Aberdeen, but when classes stopped, he found himself with a sudden surplus of time and energy. So, turning the strictures of the pandemic into an opportunity and motivation, he began planning his trip by bike across a coronavirus-hit Europe.
Less than a month later, on May 10, he was packed and ready to leave Aberdeen, in northeastern Scotland, with a phone, power bank, some tools, two changes of clothes, a raincoat, a windbreaker, a tent, sleeping bag, food for four days and water.
Can anyone blame Papadimitriou for wanting to leave chilly Scotland?
In the beginning, he had daily regrets about his self-inflicted odyssey, he said. A week into his journey, he arrived at a friend’s house in Leeds, a city in northern England, where he stayed for two days. He also took his first shower since leaving Scotland. Departing again was a challenge.
“I was thinking ‘God, what am I doing with my life,'” he said.
But his spirits lifted when he reached his first milestone: boarding a ferry from Britain to the Netherlands, and crossing his first national border. “It was the point of no return,” he said.
Four days later, and after staying at campsites, he made it to Germany. Friends of friends let him stay over in their gardens. He made it to another important, milestone: Stuttgart, where his grandmother lives.
“I hadn’t seen my grandma for so many years, and the only thing I cared about was, if something were to happen to me, I didn’t want it to happen before I got to Stuttgart.”
He stayed with her for a week to rest and refuel, his first time eating a proper homemade meal after weeks of a meagre diet. In Italy, businesses were gradually reopening after the first wave of the pandemic. He had a pepperoni pizza and a beer in the Italian Alps before heading to Venice, where he stayed for a day. Then it was on to Ancona, a seaside city on the Adriatic coast, where he boarded a ferry to Patras, in the Peloponnese region of Greece.
The turning point came at Ancona.
“The moment I believed I could make it was when I boarded the ferry from Ancona,” Papadimitriou said. His parents met him in Patras, where he was tested for the coronavirus the result was negative and the three of them cycled the final stretch together.
On June 27, they arrived home in Athens.
“I think that if I had not already done it, and if someone were to tell me I could do it, I wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “I had no idea that I had the patience and the willpower.”
