We needed a sign. So we invented one.

It was the last night of our first year. Essaouira, Morocco. The ocean was loud, the terrace was warm, and we had a question that no map could answer: where do we go next? Year one had taken us westward — France, Portugal, Gibraltar, Morocco. Now the compass was open in all directions.

We could ride south into West Africa. We could loop back up through Spain. Or — and this had been growing in us slowly for months — we could start pointing toward Asia. The world is round, and Switzerland is one long, slow drift from Thailand if you’re not in a hurry.

We needed something bigger than logic to decide. So we reached for a deck of plant tarot cards, shuffled it, and set a rule: if the card we drew was a plant native to Asia, we’d head East. If it was African, we’d go deep south. Simple. Irreversible. Perfect.

That night we didn’t know what « East » would mean for year two. It would mean Morocco again — twice more. It would mean Corsica and Sardinia, the Dolomites in a snowstorm, a festival in a Romanian castle, a Bosnian stranger who became a guide. It would mean 17 countries and the slow, deliberate understanding that the world had become our home.

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From the Atlantic coast to the Carpathians — the long way, obviously

We left Essaouira in late July 2022, riding north along Morocco’s Atlantic coast. After celebrating our first anniversary with Tessa and her extraordinary menagerie — 8 dogs, 10 cats, sheep, donkeys, horses, and one dromedary named Big Bubble — we crossed back into Spain at Gibraltar. Andalusia welcomed us with heat, white villages, and the unexpected: in Malaga, we met David, the world street skateboarding champion — the same discipline Vins had been practicing since age 11. The desert landscapes of Gorafe and Tabernas looked like we’d been teleported to the American Southwest.

A ferry to Majorca brought us to our second Workaway of the year — Sérafine’s home, where we slept in a tiny wooden cabin at the back of the garden, harvested carob, and learned about her father Mati Klarwein, one of the most extraordinary and underrated artists of the 20th century (he painted the cover of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew). Then Barcelona for three days of back-and-buttocks tattoos — Vins under the needles of Lluís and Jorge simultaneously. Then a long ferry to Sardinia for wild bivouacs with our best friends, including one night so invaded by mosquitoes we still don’t laugh about it.

Corsica came next, and with it one of the most beautiful things travel gives you: Instagram becoming real life. Flo and Lucie of @tigroufamily had been following us since day one of the trip. They offered us their home in Ajaccio. We drove every road on the island. We added them to our family of the heart.

Italy, a small detour to visit the miniature republic of San Marino and its medieval fortress, then north toward the Swiss border. It was December, nearly 500 days on the road, and Christmas was calling. We crossed back into Switzerland — and barely had time to unpack before a phone call changed the plan again.

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A festival, an embassy, and 15 days filming street art in Oualidia

Our friend Jean-Damien, a traveling cyclist we’d met on the road, was organizing a street art festival in Oualidia, Morocco — with the support of the Swiss embassy. He needed someone to film it, handle social media, and document the whole thing. He called us. We’d just arrived in Switzerland. We said yes within the hour.

Fifteen days of extraordinary artists, ocean air, and the kind of creative energy that makes you remember why you do all of this. Here is the video we made:

Back in Switzerland after the festival, we spent the winter months refitting Falkor, seeing family, and reducing the mountain of gear we’d been hauling. Then, in late March 2023, we were back on the road — this time pointing northeast.

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Six homes we didn’t know existed, six lives we briefly lived

Workaway remains the spine of how we travel. Not just because it dramatically reduces costs — though €50 a day for two people including accommodation and often food is genuinely transformative — but because it’s the fastest way to go from tourist to local. The difference between passing through a place and actually living in it is measured in meals shared, in early morning animal routines, in the private jokes that only form between people who spend real time together.

Our 6 work exchanges — Year 2 in full

★ Highlights — exchanges that left the deepest marks on the journey.

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Seven countries in one big loop — and falling for a region we barely knew

From Suzanne’s home in Salzburg — she’d initially feared the arrival of leather-clad bikers who looked like outlaws, and ended up treating us like her own children — we launched into a lighter, faster Eastern loop: Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia. These were countries we barely knew. They turned out to be revelation after revelation.

We celebrated our 666 days on the road at the 👹 DEVIL Bar in front of Lake Bled — a coincidence too perfect not to celebrate. Ljubljana charmed us completely. The Vrsič Pass and the turquoise Soča River left us speechless. In Kranjska Gora, we made one of those connections that only slow travel creates: we ran into the mother of Niki, a girl we’d met in Portugal at the very beginning of the trip. The world is smaller when you move through it slowly.

Back through Austria to collect our heavy gear from Suzanne’s garage, then south into the Dolomites. The Rossfeld Panoramastrasse, the Großglockner-Hochalpenstraße (impressive but expensive — feelings mixed), and the Dolomites themselves. There we rode with Dorothée — Crazy Biker Woman — and attempted a summit trek that ended with us in shorts, t-shirts, and flip-flops wading through 30 centimeters of snow in an incoming storm. We made it. We don’t always make smart decisions. We make good stories.

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50,000 km. The real Falkor. And a moment we’ll never forget.

When you ride a motorcycle named Falkor — after the luck dragon from The Neverending Story — and that motorcycle is a BMW, and you arrive in Munich, something cosmic is already happening. Munich is the birthplace of BMW. Founded in 1916, it’s where the brand has its historic headquarters, its main factory — the « mother plant » — the BMW Museum, and the futuristic BMW Welt complex near the Olympic Park. Falkor, in a very real sense, came from here.

But that’s only half the story. Because Munich is also home to Bavaria Filmstadt — one of the oldest and most legendary film studios in Europe. And it was there, in those studios, that The Neverending Story was filmed in 1984. The film that gave our motorcycle its name. The film whose message — keep dreaming, or the Nothing will take everything — is the philosophical spine of this entire journey.

So we went. As a pilgrimage. As a joke with the universe. And the universe answered.

At the precise moment we parked in front of the studio entrance, Falkor the motorcycle crossed 50,000 km. We stepped off, walked a few meters, and there he was: the original full-scale Falkor dragon from the film, on display, with the film’s iconic theme playing on a loop. You can climb on his back, exactly like Atreyu does in the movie.

We stood there in silence for a moment. Then we climbed on. And we let ourselves feel how improbable and perfect this was. A motorcycle named after a dragon. A film made in the very city where that motorcycle was born. A journey inspired by a story about what happens when people stop dreaming. And here we were, still going, still dreaming — 50,000 km in — sitting on the back of the creature that started it all.

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Year 2 — a budget we stopped counting exactly

Honest answer: we don’t know the exact number for year two. And that was a deliberate choice. Year one had cost us around €12,000 for two people — roughly €1,000 a month — and we’d come out of it having barely touched our savings. So for year two, we made a decision: stop tracking every cent, and keep doing what works.

What works is simple. Workaway exchanges whenever possible. Couchsurfing, which we used far more this year — a network that kept giving us beds, dinners, and local guides in cities where we had no contacts. Wild camping with Bedawang our tent. Lidl whenever there was one within range. The occasional roadside market. No hotels. Almost zero paid accommodation.

The philosophy of year two was: we have enough, so let’s spend our energy on experiences instead of accounting. Every night we weren’t paying for accommodation was a night we could spend the budget on something worth remembering — a festival in Romania, a ferry to Sardinia, a street art event in Morocco. Abundance isn’t a number. It’s a state of mind backed by smart choices.

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The things that didn’t make the highlight reel

Year 2 had weight to it. Not everything was postcard-perfect. We nearly lost a friend on a bicycle downhill. We found ourselves at the top of a mountain in a blizzard wearing summer clothes. We crossed borders alone in the dark wondering if we’d made the right calls. These moments aren’t failures — they’re the texture of a life lived without a safety net. But they deserve to be told.

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How a tent neighbor in Croatia became our guide through Bosnia

The Balkans was never on a detailed plan — it emerged from a series of encounters that kept pulling us deeper in. After the Dolomites and Slovenia, Croatia’s Plitvice Lakes, the abandoned air base of Željava that we rode through inside on Falkor, and the magical camping spot at Tulove Grede — all former film set locations — the coast pulled us south.

At a campsite near Omiš, we pitched our tent next to Damir’s. A Bosnian. After an evening of conversation, a storm moved in the next morning — and Damir invited us to follow him to Sarajevo. We trusted our instinct. We followed a stranger into his country and discovered Bosnia through his eyes — a completely different experience from any guidebook could provide.

From Bosnia to Montenegro’s Durmitor National Park — one of the most dramatic landscapes we’ve seen anywhere — then Serbia and the meandering Uvac River canyon that serpentines through the landscape like a slow, silver dream. Belgrade surprised us completely: vibrant, historically layered, welcoming, and full of the kind of street energy that makes a city feel alive at 2 AM.

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Electric Castle, Romania — when the world becomes a stage

We were in Montenegro, mid-summer, and the itch was there: a music festival. We searched across all the Balkans for something that felt right. And then we found it — Electric Castle, in Romania, in the grounds of an actual castle. Five days. Music 24 hours a day. Stages everywhere, genres for every mood. Macklemore, Iggy Pop, and hundreds of artists across dozens of stages.

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The Transfăgărășan — 12 bears and the road they call one of the world’s most beautiful

After Electric Castle, we rode into the Carpathians. The Transfăgărășan is one of those roads that gets listed in magazines as « one of the world’s most beautiful » — and for once, the superlative is accurate. It climbs through mountain scenery that seems designed by someone who had never heard the phrase « too much. »

In one hour on that road, we saw 12 bears on the roadside. Brown bears, ranging from cubs to large adults, completely indifferent to traffic. The experience of being that close — on a motorcycle, at low speed — is simultaneously thrilling, humbling, and deeply strange. It’s the kind of moment you don’t photograph well because you’re too busy feeling it.

We arrived in Sibiu for our first ever MotoCamp — a gathering of motorcycle travelers and enthusiasts that opened a new kind of community to us. In Cluj-Napoca, Alex and Ramona of Heavy Duties — the team behind Falkor’s pannier system — treated us like family. And then we rode to Cozănești, found a quiet corner of the Carpathians, and filmed our Year 2 anniversary video.

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The anniversary film — a question about why we travel

We made a film for year two. Not a travel compilation — a question. A philosophical one, written from everything the two years had taught us about movement, time, human connection, and what it means to belong somewhere. Shot in the Carpathians. Watch it:

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Six moments from Year 2 we’ll carry forever

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Two years of lessons — the ones that compound

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A year in 16 images

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The world didn’t get smaller. We got bigger.

Two years ago, a wine bottle pointed west and we left Switzerland with no plan. One year ago, a tarot card pointed east and we kept going. By August 2023, we’d lived inside 17 countries, shared meals with strangers who became family, watched 12 bears from a motorcycle, danced for five days in a Romanian castle, and understood something that no sedentary life had ever been able to teach us.

The world isn’t something you see when you travel. It’s something you become part of — slowly, deliberately, one encounter at a time. Every word we use is borrowed from someone else. Every gesture is the residue of a thousand hands that came before. Traveling this way makes that visible. Every exchange is a reminder: we are all made of each other.

We are often asked if we get bored. The question always surprises us. There is no boredom in a life where the next day is always unknown. There is occasionally fear, occasionally exhaustion, occasionally the ache of distance from the people we love. But boredom? No. Year two confirmed what year one had suggested: the longer you do this, the more necessary it becomes.

Year 3 would take us into Turkey. Then Iran. Then further East, until Thailand appeared at the end of the road — 115,000 km and 4.5 years after that rainy Sunday in Dardagny. But that’s the next story.

For now: Falkor is running. The tarot card says East. We’re going. 🐲