 | | John and Bish |
Graduates John Mitchell and Tom Bishop met at university, and have always had a taste for adventure! Having recently finished their university courses, both were subsequently encouraged to seek 'good jobs'. Obediently, they started applying for them but pretty soon realised that they didn't actually want to start their careers just yet. It’s not that a career isn’t important to the guys - it is, it’s just that they feel they still have plenty of time to settle down, and once settled, it would be difficult to find time to go travelling, especially for a long trip. We caught up with John to find out more and to find out if it really was an easy choice to make - work or travel? John told us: "It was an easy choice to make to go travelling and seeing as we both wanted the same thing and we’re good friends, of course we would go together. We knew we wanted to cycle. The great thing about cycling is that you can go wherever you want, whenever you want. Cycling is slower than many forms of transport but the upside of the gentle pace is that it offers you more time to look around you. Another big plus for cycling is that it is environmentally friendly. The question was - where would we go?"
 | | In training... |
John and Tom started discussing routes around Europe or possibly down the west coast of the USA and from there it was a simple step to put the two legs together, add a few more legs and go the whole way round the world! The guys will not be cycling the entire journey, but are sticking to sustainable transport. They want to have as little impact as possible while they travel and hope that their trip will promote this. "It's quite an ambitious journey - we're planning on it taking around 18 months. We'll be starting off in Newcastle and then travel east. The first leg will be a ferry trip across to Bergen in Norway, then we'll cycle across Scandinavia to Russia, take the train across Russia and China, cross the Pacific by cargo ship to Alaska, then we're going to cycle from Anchorage in Alaska all the way down the coast of America to Venezuela, and then across the Atlantic back home. | "There's a good chance the trip will overrun, but neither of us are too concerned about that!" | | John Mitchell |
"With our budget in mind and also with a quest for experiences, we have chosen to camp each night along the way (although we won’t turn down offers of beds should they come). We are allowing plenty of time for the trip and are not setting ourselves deadlines; if something takes our fancy then we’ll do it. We plan on having about as many days off the bikes as we do on them, the trip is as much about seeing places and meeting people as much as it is cycling the distance" explained John. John and Tom are also using the trip as a charity fund raiser; and have chosen to support Médecins sans Frontières and Friends of the Earth, they hope to raise around £10,000. "There's a good chance the trip will overrun, but neither of us are too concerned about that!" said John.
You can keep up to date with John and Tom's exploits by logging on to their website:
bishandjohn.com >
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