EPISODE 41

3 Wheels, 2 Seats, 1 Goal

What’s the best way to cycle 20,000 miles from the top of Alaska to the tip of Argentina? Probably not on a tandem bicycle pulling a trailer – by yourself – hoping that complete strangers will hop on the back seat. Still, that’s exactly what British filmmaker Dominic Gill did between 2006 and 2008. Hatched as a grand, “hairy-chested” expedition to prove his adventurer credentials, the journey quickly turned into an emotional roller coaster and a profound exploration of human connection. Hear how Dominic’s experiences led to an acclaimed documentary film, a new career, spinoff films, and even a chance encounter with his future wife, Nadia. By the time he reached Ushuaia, Dominic had hosted 270 different “stokers” on his tandem, who taught him that the most meaningful adventures aren’t about conquering the wild, but about the people with whom you share the road. Dominic’s story will hopefully inspire you to find your own unconventional journey.

Episode Transcript

Dominic: Perhaps the beginning of that journey was very literally, as cliche as it sounds, the beginning of the rest of my life, in every sense. I live in the States, I married a girl I met on that journey. Almost all of the world that I now inhabit is in some way, shape or form because of that journey.

Gabriel: You just heard Dominic Gill talk about his life-changing, 20,000-mile cycling journey from Alaska to Argentina on a tandem bicycle. His remarkable expedition became the subject of his critically acclaimed debut film, Take a Seat, which garnered a special jury prize at the Banff Film Festival and was distributed in over 45 countries. Dominic, along with his wife Nadia, whom he met on his trip, established Encompass Films in 2011. The company has since created numerous digital shorts for prominent clients such as Specialized, North Face, and Red Bull. Dominic has also gone on to receive significant recognition for his feature films and documentaries. No matter what the format, he continues to focus on content with a strong human element. If Dominic’s story sounds interesting to you, I invite you to take a seat and come along for one fun ride.

Sandra: You’re listening to The Accidental Bicycle Tourist. In this podcast, you’ll meet people from all walks of life and learn about their most memorable bike touring experiences. This is your host, Gabriel Aldaz.

Gabriel: Hello cycle touring enthusiasts! Welcome to another episode of The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast. Today’s guest, Dominic Gill, is an award-winning filmmaker who in June Alaska, with the goal of reaching, yes, you guessed it, Ushuaia, Argentina. The twist is that Dominic started his journey on a tandem bike, but pedaling alone, with the back seat left intentionally empty. Dominic would then invite complete strangers to “take a seat” and join him for a portion of what turned out to be, as the byline of his film and book goes, “20,000 miles of possibilities.” It’s an absolutely delightful premise for a bicycle tour and I’m excited to find out a lot more. Dominic Gill, thank you for being a guest on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast.

Dominic: Thank you for having me here, it’s a pleasure.

Gabriel: This idea of inviting random strangers to join you on your tandem is a simple yet powerful concept that I’m guessing completely transformed your solo expedition into a collaborative and ever- changing experience. I’m curious to find out how you got that brilliant idea in the first place. So, let’s back up all the way to your childhood and your earliest memories of riding a bicycle.

Dominic: Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely a long and winding road and no good idea is happened upon by one person only, I don’t think. I remember my mum was a very adventurous soul and she was very much of the opinion that if you’re going to do something, you should do it right. You should buy something high-quality once and never have to buy something again. So I remember when I was 11 years old, I got a really nice Peugeot mountain bike or at least really nice for then. These days it would be a laughing stock. And we started venturing further and further from home, whether it be a mile or two from where I grew up, just outside of Oxford in the UK. I don’t know if I really understood at that age the benefit of the bike as a sort of freeing tool for adventure, but I certainly benefited from it. And I would cycle down the riverbank to my aunt’s house and go and play for the afternoon there. I gained autonomy, which is of course the most amazing thing about the bike. It’s an affordable – almost affordable by anyone in the world – method of autonomy and independence, which is amazing. Yeah, as I grew up, I got more and more into adventure, more specifically, actually climbing and some mountain biking as well, but rock climbing and mountaineering. And I would go on further and further flung expeditions around the world as I grew up.

Gabriel: Around the world?

Dominic: Yeah, not traveling around the world, but to far flung places in the world. You know, I’d go on climbing expeditions to Canada or Kazakhstan or….

Gabriel: OK, I thought you were going to say you went on expeditions to Oxfordshire.

Dominic: Oh, yeah.

Gabriel: But… at what age were you going to Kazakhstan?

Dominic: Well, I remember my mum took me to climb my first 4,000-meter peak in the Alps when I was just past my tenth birthday, I think.

Gabriel: OK.

Dominic: She pushed me to go and explore, and it wasn’t the kind of pushy parent that expected excellence. It was more like, let’s see if you like this and do with it what you want. She died when I was of this influence, but it stuck with me. And she ensured that I was surrounded by a group of people, before she disappeared, that took up the mantle of like helping me have fun. I carried on climbing and I carried on mountain biking and cycling. And I remember the first real bicycle tour I guess I had, beyond trips close to home, was when I decided to cycle across the UK. West to east, I think. Yeah, west to east, that’s correct. From Lowestoft to St. David’s Head in Wales, or the other way around. It was really cool. I did it with two friends of mine. We managed to get Orbea, who was a sort of a bicycle company that was trying to gain traction back in the day, to give us some racing bicycles, which I had never ridden before. I’d never ridden a road bike. I thought I’d go exceptionally fast and it would all be very easy. I guess what we were doing was what would be called today bikepacking. You know, I had a little hip pack on and a little seat post bag. And we traveled very light and in four days we went across the UK, and went 80 or 90 miles a day and it was really, really fun. And I realized, I think, on that trip, the sort of power, the opportunity that the bicycle presented as a method of travel in a way that climbing or mountaineering didn’t. What cycling did is it allowed you to move through the world at a pace that was actually very fast. You saw a lot, but was still open to experiencing everything that passed you by. Whereas in comparison, my climbing and mountaineering trips, which I loved, take you very slowly out of society. You experience wilderness, but what you don’t experience is humanity passing you by. You know, the older I get, the more I realize what keeps the world turning is actually human interaction, not anything else. As much as I love the wilderness and it feeds my soul, I value interacting with other human beings. And the bicycle allows you to do that very effectively.

Gabriel: Well, and the tandem bicycle makes it even more close. So, we’re still getting to the idea.

Dominic: Yeah, yeah. Believe it, as convoluted as it sounds, this is all very linked.

Gabriel: Oh, yeah.

Dominic: The friend I did that first trip with, we always thought one day we’d like to do a bigger trip together. By and by, I took a gap year as lots of kids in the UK and Europe tend to do. And I worked as a carpenter in Vancouver, Canada, for the best part of a year. And I would take my weekends and time off to go adventuring and climbing up further north in Canada and do stuff. But I decided it would be really cool to do one long sort of linear expedition. You know, realizing that Vancouver is at the northern end of the Pacific Coast Highway, one of the world’s most popular bicycle touring routes, I thought it would be really cool to cycle down the West Coast to San Francisco. I called my friend, my British friend, that I had done that first little embryonic bicycle tour with in comparison, and asked if he wanted to come to Canada with me for two weeks and join me and do that ride. And he agreed and he came over, and neither of us had bicycles. So we went to the local bicycle store and started exploring what we could rent. Neither of us had much money. We were young and not particularly flush, as they say. They started running through options. They all sounded very expensive. But I noticed – I think it’s Cambie Street Bicycles in Vancouver – they had a tandem mounted on the wall. And I asked them how much it would cost to rent that. And it was significantly cheaper than renting two bicycles. And so we’re like, “How hard can this be?” They took the tandem down and we signed on the dotted line and rented that and then spent about three hours wondering if we had made a very bad decision, crashing into almost everything around the neighborhood. But eventually we made it work and we put some panniers on the side and we cycled south, quite quickly again. We traveled between 60 and 100 miles a day and had a lot of fun. But this was together, on a tandem, two people on a tandem, as you’d expect.

Gabriel: Yeah, that’s the standard configuration.

Dominic: Right. How they were designed to be used, exactly. And we got to San Francisco and it was in many ways a life-changing experience, although I didn’t realize it at that time. Time went on and I went to university and carried on doing all sorts of adventures, mostly in the climbing space. I got very seriously into rowing, actually, and that took over my life for a little bit. I’d studied environmental science and gone into environmental consultancy. About five years later, I realized I wanted to do another sort of life-changing expedition. And this idea of the tandem had always stuck with me as this amazing way to travel through the world with a friend that you have no choice but to interact with, which is an interesting experience. I think I had developed a sort of ego around adventure by that stage. The sort of white television adventurer had been born by them, the sort of Bear Grylls and Ray Mears characters we saw on TV that could survive in the wilderness with nothing but a toothpick. I think I thought that I was one of them and wanted to sort of prove it to the world. I had got into video, like amateur video making. I had won a short film competition sponsored by the BBC. The world of work at that stage was as an environmental consultant. I decided actually what I should be is a professional explorer and adventurer. So I developed a plan. I wanted to cycle a route a decent way around the world, let’s say halfway around the world that was uninterrupted. You know, there are various routes, whether that be London to Shanghai or Prudhoe Bay to Ushuaia. There are a couple of hemispherical routes that are fairly straight and kind of pure. I thought North and South America would be great, because I would only have to learn one language, not various. And I could also stop at various points and climb at iconic places, whether that be, you know, incredible granite spires in Alaska, Yosemite, Patagonia. And so I developed this very adventurous sort of hairy-chested plan of cycling a normal bicycle between these mountains. And, you know, since then, actually various people have done stuff like this. But the idea was very much on a solo mission. I approached some TV production companies in London because I wanted to get some buy-in and support for this idea. And most people laughed me out of their office, because I had no business being in television. I was not a television professional. This plan sounded like it was almost definitely going to fail. So why would anyone support me? One executive at a company called Ginger Television, which has long since disappeared, entertained the idea. And I remember he said, “This sounds great. Interested in, you know, maybe helping or at least providing a cache for your video material. You send it to us and when you get back, we can see what we can do with it.” But he said there’s something missing, like, the world’s seen this kind of thing before. You know, we’ve got these adventurers on TV before. And I was a little bit offended, obviously, because the ego in me thought, what are you talking? This is a brilliant idea. He said, “No, but there’s something missing.” And I said, “Well, like what? Give me an idea.” He said, “Well, something quirky, something a little bit different or kooky.” He looked at me and said, like, “I don’t know, what about going on a tandem and picking up strangers?” I thought the idea was a terrible one. Firstly, I thought just logistically cycling a heavily laden tandem on your own seemed like a bad idea. The idea of, like, anyone actually wanting to ride on the tandem with you seemed highly unlikely. And it took away from this, like, one man against the world notion that I’d built up in my head. But I was also a little bit desperate. So I remember a couple of weeks went by and I think I had to sort of awkwardly admit that it was a good idea. Whether it would work or not, I didn’t know. But I realized that there was an element of interest to this idea that was undeniable. And so I basically called him back and said, “I’ll do it.”

Gabriel: Was the pitch then to have a movie as the output of this trip?

Dominic: I always wanted to create a film about the journey. The idea was that this would be the launchpad for boring old environmental consultant Dominic Gill to turn into world-famous adventurer and explorer and the most interesting man in the world. That was my silly, immature concept in my brain.

Gabriel: Well, you’re aiming high. That’s good.

Dominic: Yeah, totally. I was aiming high, with almost no qualifications that suggest I should do so. Which is a very British privately-educated phenomenon. You see it all the time. It’s been around for 250 years and it’s worked for more people than it should have done.

Gabriel: It’s funny because the other side of the British mentality is this self- deprecating side.

Dominic: It is true. I think the self deprecation, it’s often false in British culture.

Gabriel: Oh, OK.

Dominic: It’s very much a way of touting your excellence without seeming like you’re doing so. But anyone in the know knows what’s going on.

Gabriel: Wow, that gets complicated.

Dominic: Yeah.

Gabriel: The false self deprecation, OK.

Dominic: It does get complicated, but it’s definitely a truism.

Gabriel: OK, so you called this executive back.

Dominic: Yup, and I told him I gave him the green light on his idea and that I would, I would be stupid enough to try it, at which point he said, “Great! OK, well, we will hear from you when you get back.” They didn’t give me any support, but they did give me a mailing address that I could send digital videotapes back to, because I physically couldn’t carry all of those on my bike at any one time. And so I thought, well, that’s as good a thing to do as any. So I bought myself a beautiful tandem bike that I really couldn’t afford, a Thorn.

Gabriel: Yeah, that’s a famous brand.

Dominic: Yeah, I mean, it’s a stunningly built expedition tandem with S&S couplings, all steel so that it could be fixed with a Rohloff hub.

Gabriel: It’s worth explaining a little about the two components that Dominic just mentioned. S&S Machine manufactures precision stainless steel couplings that are installed in the top and down tubes of a tandem frame. While in operation, the couplings form rigid joints that maintain a normal riding feel. Using a special wrench (or spanner as Dominic would call it), the couplings can be loosened, allowing the frame to be split in two and packed into boxes that conform with airline luggage limits. As for the Rohloff Speedhub, it’s an internal gear hub that replaces a cassette and rear derailleur on the drivetrain. The classic 500/14 model has 14 gears covering a wide range, although significantly heavier than cassettes, it requires less maintenance and has a longer service life. Rohloff used to offer an amazing lifetime warranty, but now it’s a two-year warranty.

Dominic: Everything was designed either to be unbreakable or to be fixable. And it really was absolutely that, but it was also expensive. I got one off the sort of showroom floor or something at a discount and said to them, “Listen, why aren’t you giving this to me for free? I’m going to be, like, a TV star. Like I’m going to make you famous.” And they went, “Sure. Yeah, sure you are. Tell you what, if you do, we’ll take the bike back and we’ll give you a full refund. But if you don’t, the bike is yours. You just pay for it.” So I bought that. I also bought a secondhand camera, the most expensive light production camera I could buy at the time, which was the Sony PD150 thing that’s like a foot and a half long and, you know, was the last word in small camera technology at the time. And I developed a bunch of aircraft aluminium camera mounts on the bike, this sort of spider web of modular camera mounts that could hold a heavy camera while I cycled. These days, looking at GoPros and stuff, it’s a different world. And so then I got a plane ticket up to the top of Alaska and I started this journey. The last place where I really doubted myself, I remember, was at US Customs in Vancouver. You go through US Customs in Canada before you fly into Alaska and you have to go through with all of your baggage. And so I had my tandem bicycle in two boxes and my trailer, I had a BoB trailer and all the other stuff that was in boxes or bags, and I went up to the immigration lady at the front of the line and she said, “What’s in the bags?” And I said, “Well, it’s actually a tandem bicycle split into two pieces,” at which point she asked the sensible question, “Who’s traveling with you here?” And I said, “No one’s traveling with me.” I’m actually traveling on my own on the tandem and picking up strangers, but you know, you don’t have to know about that. She said, “Seriously, who’s traveling with you?” And I said, “No one,” at which point she asked me to get out of the line and give me a more thorough interrogation.

Gabriel: Give you a full psychological evaluation.

Dominic: Exactly, exactly.

Gabriel: So wait a minute though, Dominic, you just kind of threw in that you also had a BoB trailer. So do you know how much weight you were pulling? Because so far we have the tandem, all of your filmmaking gear, a trailer… How many kilos was it?

Dominic: Yeah, so it was always somewhere between 60 and 120 kilos. Depending on how much water and food I had to carry with me for certain portions of the journey. It averaged around, yeah, like 190 pounds. So 90 kilos.

Gabriel: Wow.

Dominic: Yeah, it was a slow tank of a machine and it was about 14, 15 foot long with the BoB trailer. It definitely made me strong, but it didn’t make me fast. I arrived at Prudhoe Bay with all the oil workers. You know, bicycle touring up to Prudhoe Bay or back has now become quite popular, but at that time it was rarely done. Not never, but rarely. There was certainly no tourism infrastructure up there. And I remember pitching my tent next to a big oil truck and a workshop where they were fixing drilling equipment. And I felt so lonely and definitely this tandem bicycle exacerbated that feeling of loneliness. But also I suddenly realized I’d ejected myself from a perfectly good life with all of the privilege and opportunity into this slightly precarious situation. And I definitely doubted myself. Like, there was no one there, except for, I remember there was an Arctic fox that was particularly interested in my rations. And so he hung out with me, but that was it. And I had 10 days of the whole road to understand how to ride this machine and understand whether there was any chance in hell that anyone might jump on the back. I realized that I put myself in this position. It sounds very self-pitying, which I was at the time, but looking back on it, it’s like, you’re a privileged idiot, you know. But it was a funny feeling. I definitely felt unsure of what I was just about to embark on.

Gabriel: So that begs the question. How did you pick up your first passenger? Because the first one is often the hardest one.

Dominic: Absolutely. Well, first of all, I made the mistake of thinking of them as passengers, but obviously any tandem enthusiast will say that definitely not passengers. They are stokers. These people are additional horsepower… in theory.

Gabriel: Yeah, okay, point taken.

Dominic: So what happened is, I had about five days of really not seeing a living soul, other than oil trucks going past me. You’re cycling along the tundra in Alaska, which is a tragically beautiful landscape. There’s very little there. The sort of minimalism of it makes it very hypnotic and interesting. Your only partner is the oil pipeline about half a mile away from the road, parallel to the road. And I would stop every day and fish in a little creek and get food and eat my rations and feel lonely. On about Day Five, I came across a jeep that had driven north and it was full of kids, American kids, like a little younger than me on a sort of, you know, road trip of a lifetime, equivalent in some ways to what I was doing. There were four of them in this rag top jeep and one of them wanted to get on the bike.

Gabriel: Haha!

Dominic: Just like that, we found ourselves camped next to this creek and I was, of course, very excited to be camping with other human beings and we talked and they were great. And Charlie Kunken, his name was, a New Yorker, said, “Hell yeah! I’m going to get on the bike and then my boys can meet me two or three days south.”

Gabriel: Oh, wow. Okay.

Dominic: That is what happened. And it was, like, a very joyous moment for me that I realized that what I had represented an opportunity for other people – or for a select group of other people, I guess. We spent, yeah, I think two or three days cycling together and the jeep would sort of leapfrog us occasionally. They had gone do their thing and occasionally meet up with us. It was real fun. It was a funny tiny miniature roller coaster of like sadness, loneliness and jubilation, which became the kind of blueprint for the next two years of my life.

Gabriel: The roller coaster.

Dominic: Yeah. And not as much because of the sort of physical challenge, although that was obvious. Because of the obvious nature of that, that becomes a constant, right? The roller coaster was an emotional one of meeting people in some way, you know, falling in love with these people and falling in love with this idea of, like, company, and then by your own design, ejecting it and casting yourself into a lonely state again. And then the wheel goes around again and again and again and again. I hadn’t considered that as the most challenging part of the journey. I’d considered the sort of physical hardship as the hardest part.

Gabriel: Right. And it also doesn’t fit in with your image of this conquering adventurer, that the emotional part should be the hardest, because you thought maybe that it would be about physical strength. But, that’s interesting.

Dominic: Yeah. I agree. And not wanting to get ahead of myself, but perhaps the beginning of that journey was very literally as cliche as it sounds, the beginning of the rest of my life in every sense. I live in the States, I married a girl, I met on that journey.

Gabriel: Oh!

Dominic: Almost all of the world that I now inhabit is in some way, shape or form, because of that journey, whether it be the fact that I’m a professional filmmaker, because that film worked, or because I work in the bike industry, because that journey allowed people in the bike industry to trust that I know something about cycling. Yeah, it changed my life completely.

Gabriel: What do you mean you work in the bike industry?

Dominic: That documentary was a relative success. I came back and I did scramble together a documentary that aired in the UK called Take a Seat. While I made no money on that at all, it was a great calling card for what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be a filmmaker. That calling card was all I really had. I didn’t have a professional education in filmmaking. I didn’t go to film school. I never worked my way up a film production company. But then, when I moved to America, when I moved in with a girl I met in Bolivia who was from Los Angeles, born and raised in Los Angeles, she and I started a production company together. She was a lawyer. I was an environmental scientist. We both decided we wanted to make film.

Gabriel: Of course.

Dominic: Our first port of call in terms of getting clients in the sort of branded content commercial space was the bicycle industry, because that was where I had the strongest connection. I’m sure you’ll remember a brand, it’s still around, called Blackburn Design.

Gabriel: Sure.

Dominic: They make all these accessories for cycling. And Jim Blackburn, who was a pioneer in the world of bike touring back in the day.

Gabriel: Well, the Blackburn rack…

Dominic: Exactly.

Gabriel: Is his design and is the iconic rack that’s been copied many times.

Dominic: Yeah. That was the blueprint for sort of modern day bicycle touring in many ways.

Gabriel: Exactly.

Dominic: We used to go to trade shows to try and garner interest for like branded storytelling, we call it. And I remember we went and saw Blackburn and met a guy that’s become a lifelong friend now called Robin Sansom, who was the then marketing manager for that brand. He was ahead of his time in many ways. And he had the vision that he wanted to tell stories about normal people doing relatively extraordinary things and allow Blackburn, the brand, to be a part of those stories. So not commercials per se, but now what we know as branded content. And so he contracted us to start making stories about people that the brand supported cycling routes like the PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway, or the Great Divide on mountain bikes. And so our production company got going by flying to the middle of Montana or somewhere in central Oregon, meeting up with these bike tourists and filming their stories on behalf of Blackburn. Gradually we developed a repertoire of films mostly in the bike space initially, but gradually we expanded from there into what we do now. It was all because of that tandem bike journey that Robin was able to trust me initially to make this content.

Gabriel: And your company is Encompass Films.

Dominic: Correct, yeah.

Gabriel: And when you say what we do now, what other areas have you expanded into?

Dominic: We expanded from doing fairly traditional adventure sports and extreme sports coverage and commercial and branded content with the likes of Red Bull or North Face or Specialized or whoever it is. These things that now are a very common part of the sort of media landscape. We gradually and fairly organically spread more into what I call more human stories, where the subject is secondary and the character is primary. And using my background in environmental science and my love of the outdoors, I would say we subtly changed the nature of our offerings and our storytelling to now be very wide-reaching. And I would say what we do now is tell stories about anyone and anything that has one foot firmly planted in the outdoor environment in any way, shape or form. So whether that be a scientist that skis the polar ice caps looking for bacteria that may help digest plastics or someone that lives on the street in San Francisco that is forging human connections with those around him. And we do very well in the outdoor environment and the outdoor environment fuels my imagination. So I like to make sure that’s always a part of every story we tell.

Gabriel: Sounds good.

Dominic: I’m still tied into the cycling industry. I still make cycling films when I’m asked to for people like Shimano or individuals. And actually there’s a relatively famous ex-pro rider now pro gravel rider called Pete Stetina in the States who used to be on the European tour. And I’m making a film with him at the moment, which is really interesting. He’s retiring from the sport of professional cycling. And we’re making a film about how difficult it is to retire from cycling, because it’s become an identity. It’s really a film about quitting while you’re ahead, which I think is the secret to happiness. It’s very difficult to learn the lesson that you can’t always chase youth without making yourself very unhappy. And so we’re making a film about the struggle of when to hang up your hat in order to keep a firm grasp on happiness in life. So still using the storytelling vehicle of cycling, but really the overarching story is much bigger than that, much more universal. And I’m really enjoying these days using sports or adventure or outdoors in some way, shape or form as a method of doing that, of telling universal truths.

Gabriel: Sounds fascinating.

Dominic: It is. I also add, and this might add a little bit of context, I think I got bored or frustrated with this idea that I originally set out with, which is a hairy-chested white man jumping off things or climbing up things or traveling across things like no one has ever done before. That is old and honestly small-minded and the least interesting part of what the world has to offer in terms of human stories now.

Gabriel: As a side note, it’s interesting. I decided to call the podcast The Accidental Bicycle Tourist, because a few years ago when I started listening to bicycle touring podcasts, I mean, it was probably subconscious, but I did find that a lot of these adventures were by these ultra endurance, super incredible people who would bike 200 miles per day and sleep three hours per night and do all these kinds of things, which I must say, it is impressive.

Dominic: Yeah.

Gabriel: But the reason for the “accidental” part was I wanted to have other types of people relate more to it, the people who were maybe afraid to even wild camp for one night or the people who didn’t want to ride a bicycle initially at all and then found themselves traveling across a continent, or something. I find these stories to be much more interesting because everyone has these fears or – you talk very openly about the loneliness you felt – and on social media there’s, like on these podcasts, there’s this misconception that the people who are out there are just like, man, look at this, climbing another huge mountain and looking great doing it. So I totally understand you and I have heard from people that enjoy hearing this other, more human side of it, which is all of the second-guessing and the doubt and ultimately for a lot of people the exhilaration of succeeding, doing something they didn’t think they could do, which a lot of people accomplished.

Dominic: Like you, I’m very impressed by ultra endurance athletes or these new breed of like something beyond that, this like crazy, crazy endurance, no-sleep kind of athlete that travels across continents in a heartbeat. There’s a big part of me that thinks that is really missing the point of why we’re here on this planet. If you are traveling through country after country, not interacting with the people around you, quite apart from the fact I think it’s a little bit disrespectful, you’re missing the biggest opportunity we have to understand why we’re here and understand the joy of this planet, which is looking at someone in the face and interacting with them in their territory. There’s so much to be gained from that. Like I say, this is something I discovered in spite of myself, right? By the end of that journey, all I wanted to do is sit quietly with someone and break bread with them. I didn’t want to go climbing. I didn’t want to conquer a peak or like I’m not interested in that anymore. At least I’m not interested in that being a big part of how I spend my time. I will always chase those demons a little bit, but I’m not about to try and share it with the world as the world’s most interesting story.

Gabriel: Well put. Now let’s get back to your trip.

Dominic: One thing we haven’t talked about at all, mostly because I think it’s the least interesting part, but nevertheless, a lot of people are interested in the sort of more technical aspects of bicycle journeys. I think cyclists are a fairly nerdy bunch on the whole. And so, you know, stats and equipment and stuff are interesting. The stats that I always blow my mind for me is like the number of mechanicals that I had on the journey were relatively few, but I did manage to break a Rohloff hub on the journey.

Gabriel: Really?

Dominic: And they kindly sent me another one because they’re guaranteed for life. In Baja California, which is approximately a thousand miles long from Tijuana, or from San Diego, to La Paz on the other end of it, I managed to get about as many flat tires as I got companions on my entire journey. So about 270 flats because of cacti. Every night I would roll off the road and Baja is home to the most aggressive spines from cacti you will ever see. They go through car tires, bicycle tires, no problem at all. And so every time I’d roll off the road to camp, I’d wake up in the morning and one or two or three of my tires would be flat. So every day would start by fixing them. And I tried to be very diligent about avoiding thorns, but it just was impossible. And I didn’t have tubeless tires at that stage. It wasn’t really a thing. You know, there are interesting mechanicals.

Gabriel: Did the inner tubes have 20 patches each or what? Obviously, you can’t…

Dominic: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I kept recycling. I’d be like, oh, this inner tube needs some work. I’ll take it out. I’ll put a new one in. And then the next few days, I’d patch that inner tube and get it as good as new again and put it back in. And then later on in the journey, when I was in places where I couldn’t get a hold of spokes – I would often snap spokes because of the weight of the bike – but then towards the very end of the trip, I wasn’t snapping spokes. But because of the deforming of the rim and just the thousands and thousands of miles of washboard roads, everything was getting slack. And I had tightened the spokes as much as the thread would allow, so I began to buy wire and laterally tighten the spokes. So create a spider’s web in the wheel that actually creates any tension in both of the wheels, which worked. You know, it allowed me to carry on. It wasn’t fantastic, but it was a little like, I don’t know if anyone’s familiar with the cartoon Wacky Races. It’s these Loony Tunes, old cartoons from probably the necessary, these weird and wonderful machines would stay flying in the air or driving on the road. It felt a little bit like that. I did whatever I could to keep myself on the road.

Gabriel: What’s one thing that you fixed with duct tape?

Dominic: Oh, what did I fix with duct tape? I don’t know how many of your listenership know that sort of tried-and-tested trick of fixing rip tires with dollar bills or paper money. You slide a dollar bill in between the inner tube and the tire, and it actually does a relatively good idea of keeping the integrity of the tire for a few more miles. I also used a duct tape on the inside of tires in an effort to create sort of crude puncture resistance, but also prevent rips from seeing daylight. It’s a horrible use of duct tape, because especially in hot weather, obviously, all the glue begins to create this disgusting, sticky, counterproductive layer inside of the tire, which probably does more harm than good. But duct tape, as you’re suggesting, fixes everything for five minutes at least.

Gabriel: Yup. We only got as far as your first ride. I did see that you ended up having 270 stokers?

Dominic: Yes.

Gabriel: And so we can’t talk about all of them, but can you just highlight a couple from your journey that really stand out?

Dominic: I definitely can. Yeah, it’s very interesting to think of all of the people that got in my back seat for the myriad different reasons. Those reasons ranged from happening to be cycling past a school in Latin America when they got out of school, and kids would just run over to the bike and jump over it like a dead man on a donkey and just be pulled around by me, whether I liked it or not. So that’s sort of one end of the spectrum of these people. To the other end, I remember a lady called Jules Kresco was an American Airlines pilot based in Colorado who had heard about my journey. Back in those days, I wrote a blog, which probably 20 people followed or something. One of them happened to be a bike mechanic somewhere in Colorado. And this lady who got her bike fixed by this guy, heard about my journey, reached out to me and said, “Hey, can I come and join you in El Salvador?” And she ended up piloting an American Airlines flight into El Salvador, packing her captain’s uniform into my BoB Trailer and cycling through El Salvador, Honduras, and piloting another commercial aircraft out of Nicaragua. So she joined me for the best part of a month or so. So some people really, like, traveled to come and be part of the trip, which is amazing.

Gabriel: How is that though? We’ve talked a lot on the podcast about how it’s important to really be compatible with your travel partners. And unfortunately, relationships have ended. People who thought they were compatible went on a bike tour together and they ended up splitting up. The word that I use is always “intense.” It is intense to be with a person on a tour. And so it’s a little bit mind-boggling that suddenly you’re traveling with an American Airlines pilot for months. Were you compatible with this person at all? It just seems absolutely astonishing.

Dominic: Well, I think what helped is the fact that I was most of the time loving the idea of having company. And again, the roller coaster has two ends to the ride, right? There’s this yearning for company, exhilaration of having company. And then, as you say, like relationships, one way or another run their course always, whether that be over an entire lifetime or over a couple of hours. One thing I tried and most of the time succeeded, I think in doing, was I realized I’d made this. I had invented this silly journey. So the last thing I should be doing is telling people not to be a part of it, right? So if people wanted to jump on the bike, I would try never to prevent them from doing that. And I would also try not to tell them when they had to get off. However, human interactions self-regulate. If you’re getting on really well together, someone might be like, “You know, I was going to get off in the next town, but how about I hang out for another couple of days and find a way back to where I was going to go?” Or often the other way was true, which is, “You know what? You can just drop me off here.”

Gabriel: Right now.

Dominic: Right. That actually didn’t happen very often.

Gabriel: No, I don’t think so.

Dominic: It’s a little bit like hitchhiking. People always say, wow, you’re so brave picking these people up. They could murder you. They could do anything. And I’m like, “Wait, I’m brave? I have everything I need relatively to survive. I have my bicycle. I have all of my survival gear. I have my machete. I have everything. My world is here. This is my house. This is my fortress. And someone is choosing to join me and leave everything they know behind. Who is the brave person here? Right? Who is the person at risk here? It’s the person getting on my bicycle.” So in many ways, especially the women that chose to join this journey, and a lot of people chose to join it because it was a way of, I think, experiencing bike touring with company before perhaps trying to go out and do it solo, were extremely brave for trusting that I was not a very strange, potentially threatening person. The relationships ran the gamut from becoming lifelong friends with people or falling in love with people to being okay if they were only going to be on the bike for 15 minutes.

Gabriel: Okay. That’s one extreme we don’t need to investigate, but let’s investigate the other extreme, which is you said that you met your future wife in Bolivia. Can you tell a little bit about that?

Dominic: Yeah. It’s actually a bit of an anomalous story because she never got on the bike. I had just arrived in Uyuni on the edge of the Bolivian salt flats. It’s strange to think that I’m old enough now that I did it in a time that was very different back then. Now it’s a sort of Instagram paradise that everyone knows of, but back then it was this sort of daliesque landscape that people may have read about in strange novels, but no one really knew about. And I met Nadia, is her name, who was traveling independently in Chile and Bolivia, trying to deny the fact that she had just become a lawyer and she didn’t really know why. I heard an American voice and sometimes it’s just nice to speak English. By that stage, my Spanish was fluent, but I thought, let’s go and see what this tiny little tourist hotspot has to offer. So I went and she bought me two or three beers. I was in a bad spot, you know, nutritionally. I looked pretty haggard. And we chased the sort of sun and shadow across the little plaza in Uyuni, kept moving our chairs and having beers and talking. I think we both made an impression on each other, but I actually was due to meet someone the very next day to cycle across the flats and into Chile with. I don’t think she was particularly interested in getting on the bike, nor was it a possibility at the time. But the reason we ended up staying in touch was not because of that meeting. It was because she had mentioned that she would try and leave me a care package in San Pedro, which is a village in Chile that I would reach about ten days after going across the highest part of the journey. Sure enough, when I got to San Pedro, I was probably four or five kilos lighter. I was even hungrier. I was on my own again at that stage going through the desert. And I was desperate for whatever care package I could get in Chile, where the exchange rate was very unfavorable compared to Bolivia. She had left a care package indeed full of really nice sort of sesame seeds and nuts and stuff that her parents had sent her on her travels. And she left in it a note with her email address, a book, and a map of the stars. All these things that she had got given and she didn’t any longer need because she was traveling home. And so for the next ten days I cycled across the Atacama Desert. I would get up at four in the morning when the wind was calm. I would cycle until about midday when the wind would get up in my face and I didn’t want to cycle anymore. And I would ride into the desert, find a little bit of corrugated tin or detritus to shelter my head from the sun. I would read the book she’d given me, Dave Eggers’ book called What is the What, a fantastic book. And then it got dark, I cooked. And then I would get out the map of the stars that she gave me and I’d watched the map of the stars. So for ten days I had a reason to remember this person, because I was looking at the stuff she gave me. We kept in touch a little bit and I wrote a book about my journey. I tried desperately to try and get her to London for my book launch. At this stage I realized I wanted to get to know Nadia. She did come to London for the book launch and two years later I went to Los Angeles to make a sort of spin off my next documentary and I asked to sleep on her couch. Facebook had been invented by then. I got in touch with her. She said that I could come and stay. I fell in love and spent the next six months from the UK writing love letters and trying to convince her to date me. And eventually it worked. After that one meeting we had this incredibly accelerated dating from afar. And then I moved to the States. We moved in together. We started our production company. We started working together, all simultaneously. There was no trial period in our relationship. And here we are living in Lake Tahoe together with no kids but a beautiful dog and an incredible life and company. So that’s the more extreme end of that journey.

Gabriel: Yeah. I think you may be even surprising yourself when you describe how it went.

Dominic: Well, it’s nuts, actually. She’s in Spain at the moment. I haven’t seen her for two or three weeks, and they say absence makes the heart grow fonder. And so I’m thinking, yeah, this is actually really cool.

Gabriel: What a way to meet. Since this movie was made, all of the characters we’ve talked about, have you filmed them in some way? When you describe this scene in San Pedro de Atacama and you’re sitting with Nadia, is there a camera rolling somewhere that we don’t know about, or? How does this work as a filmmaker and also you have your life. How do these two things come together for you?

Dominic: It’s a really good question. I made a decision early on partly because I was immature filmmaker. I had no experience. I, to a fault, often put the camera away for extended periods of time, because I wanted to live this adventure primarily not film this adventure. And while cameras actually affect people a lot less now, because we all have one in our pocket, back then getting a camera out was a very significant action. You know, it either caused people to play a part, you know, and act up for the camera, or it made people very uncomfortable. And very rarely was it something else. It was one of those two things. The typical scenario that we’ve all seen as you get a camera out and five or six young children gravitate to the camera and get in front of it which is beautiful but it changes life. And I didn’t want to do that for two years non-stop. So sometimes for two weeks at a time I would just live my journey, particularly when I was tired or having very special experiences which the filmmaker and me now in hindsight would say, that is exactly when I should have got the camera out. That is what makes the world-changing stories. But at the time I didn’t care. I just wanted to experience this for myself. So, was there a camera rolling when I met Nadia? Absolutely not. Was there a camera rolling when I was crying in a refugio somewhere feeling very sorry for myself? Unlikely. But in two years I rolled the camera enough to get plenty of footage. I think I got 260 hours of footage in the end. And could it have been a much better, much more heartfelt much more profound film? Absolutely, but I was neither experienced or mature enough necessarily to do that. But I also first and foremost wanted to have a personal experience.

Gabriel: And you mentioned that there was also a book. That’s a bit of a surprise. So how did the book come about?

Dominic: I love writing, and I wrote 10 or 15 exercise books worth of journals on that trip. I developed a love of writing, I think, on the journey. When the film came out it came out quite quickly, like eight, nine months after I got back a literary agent got in touch and said, “Would you consider writing a book?” I thought it’s funny. I would always love to have written a book about this journey and I have, you know, so much material on hand to do so. And so then I wrote a book and it was published by a really great publisher. I was very lucky that the whole process was not the minefield that book publishing often is. Again, it’s a book called Take a Seat, the same name as the film. People seem to enjoy it, but in hindsight I look at the book and in the same way as the film, it’s a great document of the journey but it’s also immature. A lot of it lacks not honesty but some of the details of more vulnerable moments that would have been interesting to detail. Like, I was not as open and honest as perhaps a really awesome travel book requires. I guess I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t grown up enough to do that I think and I think a lot of people often fall into that category when they write travel memoirs. It’s a little bit surface level, but at the very least I think hopefully it was an interesting document for people to enjoy.

Gabriel: In my research I also noticed that there were spinoffs.

Dominic: Yeah.

Gabriel: You took the Take a Seat concept to other places. I don’t know if I want to call it a franchise, that might be a bit extreme, but can you just talk a little bit about that? How many Take a Seats are there? How many trips did you do?

Dominic: Yeah, so there was obviously that first big one, and the first cut is always the deepest. On that trip I met an old man called Ernie in California who I was inspired to dream up another tandem adventure with. He was an older man with leukemia that had always had a dream of cycling across the country but was too old and sick to do so on his own, so I thought, well, the tandem is a fantastic device to do that. And so I developed a spinoff idea and got support for a spinoff idea of cycling across the states with Ernie. You know, I would discover America and he would rediscover this country he’d spent his whole life in. I developed support for that I got an amazing semi-recumbent bicycle for it and then literally at the 11th hour he got too sick to go on the trip.

Gabriel: Oh no.

Dominic: So I was left with financial support and a bicycle to do an amazing journey, but no companion. Nadia actually helped me scramble together a Plan B, and we took ten different people with different disabilities that prevented them from having an independent adventure across the states. We for instance picked one guy up in LA and cycled to Las Vegas with him, and then we got to Las Vegas, made sure he would get home, safely, and then we went in search for madly wanted to go on this trip, and we would knock on the door of institutes for the blind or prosthetics hospitals or, you know, special needs facilities and spread the word that we had an amazing, comfortable seat with a freewheel mechanism to allow someone to take part physically as much or as little as they wanted in the next leg of our journey. And in that way we found ten different people for ten different legs and traveled for four months across the country with people that in some cases were non-verbal, non-ambulatory. It was in many ways the most special thing that I’ve ever done from a storytelling perspective. It was magical. I learned so much from these people. And talk about brave. A blind person 100 percent embracing perfect strangers to look after them for the next you know, six, ten days in a territory that they have no idea where they’re being taken in reality.

Gabriel: And they also had no advance notice to get accustomed to the idea that they would be doing this.

Dominic: Right.

Gabriel: That’s incredible.

Dominic: It speaks to how badly they wanted this sense of adventure. Way more than me. It blew my mind. One particular girl, called Rachel, that we met in Minnesota, she has cerebral palsy. She couldn’t walk unaided, she was non-verbal. She communicated with a word sheet. One of her carers begged us, said, “Listen, I know that all the medical journals and stuff will say that you should absolutely not be doing this,” but they begged us to take Rachel. And she was in so many ways the most capable adventurer we had, because she said yes to everything. She was tired of being told she couldn’t do things. She said yes to absolutely everything, and it was a really humbling and amazing experience. So that in short was the first spinoff, called Take a Seat: Sharing a Ride Across America.

Gabriel: Did you ever watch the classic movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?

Dominic: Of course, yes.

Gabriel: Remember when the Jack Nicholson character takes all of the other patients out…

Dominic: On a field trip.

Gabriel: On the bus field trip.

Dominic: Yeah.

Gabriel: Nurse Ratchet and all the other people are going ballistic and he just grabbed that bus and he takes them and they have the greatest time, because they’re doing something. They’re not just wasting away in some facility.

Dominic: It, it brings tears to my eyes thinking about it because it’s so… ego is the prerogative of the young I think in some ways, and I was still pretty young there was still part of me that was like, “I, I am cycling these people around.” I missed the point in so many ways, even at the time, you know. And I think back on it and it’s just, yeah, it was it’s a really humbling experience. And it was worth mentioning that my last companion on the Alaska Argentina trip became a very good friend. Alonso, a Chilean. We became such good friends that I trained him up to drive the support vehicle and film on that journey across the United States. It wasn’t about being unsupported. Obviously, with these people with special needs, we needed a way in which to look after them if necessary.

Gabriel: Sure.

Dominic: So he drove our SAG wagon and filmed. And so there was this lovely thread from the first journey into the second of this guy that didn’t speak any English but he was a much, in many ways, wiser person than I was. He took such good emotional care of all my bicycling companions on that journey and was such a valuable part of the journey. And Nadia also joined me on her own bicycle and cycled alongside us. It was a really lovely evolution.

Gabriel: Yes, and it makes me think of how Alonso’s life changed the moment he hopped on to the tandem. He could not have imagined that anything like this would happen. What an experience for him as well.

Dominic: Yeah. I consider myself so lucky to have met him and had his companionship as well.

Gabriel: Wow. And so you say that was the first spinoff.

Dominic: Yes.

Gabriel: Then there’s more.

Dominic: Well, then Nadia took some of the storytelling reigns. And Nadia is half Egyptian. Her father flew MiG fighter jets in the same air force battalion as Hosni Mubarak.

Gabriel: Okay.

Dominic: One man becomes a despot, or a dictator, and the other man ends up being a humble contractor in the United States. When the Arab Spring, or when the unrest started happening in Egypt and North Africa, she developed obviously a keen interest on the situation. Hosni Mubarak was deposed, and I was in the edit bay of Sharing a Ride Across America still when I remember she burst in one day and said, “We should take this concept to Egypt now.” And cycle around Egypt picking up young Egyptians to take a temperature on how culture was changing in that country. And at the time it was an exciting change, right? They were getting out from under the thumb, or the boot, of dictatorship and potentially it was this spring, the Arab Spring, this huge horizon of opportunity ahead of them. Obviously, in hindsight we know that that is not what happened. We decided to take the tandem idea there. We cycled around the perimeter of the country, pretty much, for two months and we picked up young Egyptians. A little bit more premeditated. Obviously, the majority of Egyptians live in Cairo, the capital, or along the Nile. But in the same basic fashion, we picked up young people and interviewed them a little bit more conscientiously along the journey about their culture, as they also discovered parts of their country they’d never been to. And the very profound and sad thing that happened on that journey as we started in Tahrir Square. You know, the heart of the revolution what’s become the symbol of revolution in many ways. We left, traveled counterclockwise around the country, and when we got back to Tahrir Square, it had been taken over again by the military. So we left this place of great hope and community to something that was ring-fenced by soldiers and tanks. It was a more sober

Dominic: When you said you went around the perimeter, my knowledge of Egyptian geography is hazy, but aren’t all of the main population centers either on the Mediterranean coast or on the Nile river and the Red Sea? Isn’t there this huge inland part where there’s absolutely

Dominic: Yeah, yeah. So the perimeter, broadly speaking, is the sort of populated zone. Like, we went from Cairo to Alexandria, Iskandaria, which is on the Mediterranean coast. We traveled that for a while then we went through the Sahara, and that is a fairly empty place, but it’s dotted with oases. So there’s obvious route through the desert, with population centers albeit small. And then we traveled some of the Nile, which obviously again is a ribbon of development and population, and then through the Sinai Peninsula, then back across the Nile. So we traveled through some wilderness but really if there’s a road you are going to be going through the populated areas, one way or another.

Gabriel: Yeah. The piece I was missing were the oasis hopping.

Dominic: Yes.

Gabriel: Did you just pick up somebody at one oasis and drop them off at the next oasis?

Dominic: We would, but as I say a lot of the time it was a little bit more premeditated, because sometimes they would take a bus from Cairo or Alexandria.

Gabriel: Okay.

Dominic: So it wasn’t as spontaneous. And definitely in Egypt I think it would have been more difficult. There’s a lot more poverty in the smaller rural areas. Poverty and a vast cultural difference I think would make it much more difficult to pick anyone up for any length of time. There were, of course, many children that would jump on the bike and go for rides around the block. That’s not quite the same thing.

Gabriel: Interesting. So that one sounds a bit different.

Dominic: It was a bit different, and I would reiterate as well, part of the difference was brought about because they were in this limbo situation politically, where no one really knew who to trust often, not bicycles but Toyota Land Cruisers driving around, for instance – we had a support vehicle on that as well – we’re not necessarily to be trusted. I think we were treated with a much higher level of suspicion than Egyptian culture would normally have regarded us with, through no fault of their own. The secret police were everywhere and in plain clothes. Not a place where you would openly interact with the world, necessarily.

Gabriel: Yup, I guess that’s one of the consequences of heading over there at that time. That comes with the territory.

Dominic: It was a very interesting time to be there, but not a time which allowed the Egyptians to necessarily show their true selves, which they’re an amazing, you know, country. They used to be known as the Paris of North Africa. Open, progressive. Unfortunately things can go backwards and we’re seeing that all over the world these days, including this country. The States.

Gabriel: Is that the last of the Take a Seats?

Dominic: There was a brief Take a Seat flirtation in Alberta, Canada. As our production company developed, we started doing a little bit more branded content, and I cycled around Alberta on behalf of their tourism arm.

Gabriel: Oh, okay. This is closer to Instagram now.

Dominic: Absolutely, absolutely. The world was changing and I was jumping on, on the horse, and it was really interesting that while it was a lovely journey and we enjoyed it, of course it was the least profound, because the reasons for doing it are less… genuine, maybe?

Gabriel: Yeah, okay.

Dominic: It was great. I loved it. It taught me a lot about filmmaking, but the heart is clearly not profoundly there.

Gabriel: Right. I guess you really didn’t encounter any difficult situations on that tour. I imagine the roller coaster was a lot flatter.

Dominic: With each one of these the roller coaster subsides, because especially with loved ones or a support crew of some kind, responsibilities to create output in terms of film content, you know, increased, because it became my job. So that roller coaster each time flattened out a little bit, in many ways. Not in terms of physical hardship necessarily but in terms of emotional hardship, certainly.

Gabriel: If somebody would like to watch one or all of the Take a Seat movies, what is the best way to do it?

Dominic: Yeah, it’s actually a harder question to answer than it should be. Take a Seat: Sharing a Ride Across America is a 10-part series split up into the individuals that rode with me. And Take a Seat: Egypt is a five-part series. Both of those are available, I think, on Amazon Prime for purchase. They may even also be available on the Vimeo video platform to purchase. Take a Seat, the original, is not available anywhere.

Gabriel: Really?

Dominic: It was a 45- minute film made for ITV and I hold none of the rights. I do have a copy of it, so if someone really wanted to see it, they should get in touch with me and I can probably make it happen. But in terms of being widely available, illegally I can’t do that for all sorts of reasons. We actually managed to use the Sony Music licensing umbrella and I will never be able to do this in my film career, ever again. We were able to use all of the hottest artists. There’s a Johnny Cash track in that film. These days, if I wanted to use that, it would cost me blanket license, and so for that reason, allowing that to be on wide release is extremely difficult now. It aired in 15 or or four years, but that was back in 2009.

Gabriel: Wow.

Dominic: But if people want to get in touch, I might be able to waste 45 minutes of their life, if they really want to see it.

Gabriel: Oh come now. That’s the self-deprecation.

Dominic: Well, that is self-deprecation. It is, but I will say it’s definitely a blast from the past. It’s a standard definition film that is a very different style of television from what we’d expect these days. It’s also… it’s kind of interesting, I guess, yeah.

Gabriel: I’m sure it is. How does somebody get in touch with you?

Dominic: They can either do so on my website, so dominic@encompassfilms.com or encompassfilms.com. You’ll find both Nadia and my email address. We’re a very small production company, so if you send an email to any one of those email addresses, we’ll see it. I would say reach out on Instagram, but maybe don’t. I try to check it less and less these days. So, good old- fashioned email might be the best way.

Gabriel: Okay.

Dominic: I would just finish with, like, I realized that all time I’ve been talking about stuff that needn’t be about bicycle touring at all, but I think that’s because what I learned through bicycle touring is the importance of human interaction and not taking yourself out of communities and out of earshot of other people that you can interact with, but the real magic is mixing with people and sharing stories and doing what people are increasingly bad at these days, which is looking at people, you know, in the face and smiling and talking.

Sandra: The transcript for this episode is available on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist website. I welcome feedback and suggestions for this and other episodes. You’ll find a link to all contact information in the show notes. If you would like to rate or review the show, you can do that on your favorite podcast platform. You can also follow the podcast on Instagram. Thank you to Anna Lindenmeyer for the cover artwork and to Timothy Shortell for the original music. This podcast would not be possible without continuous support from my wife, Sandra. And thank you so much for listening. I hope the episode will inspire you to get out and see where the road leads you.

Dominic: When I was 15 or 16, I think, I decided to cycle across the States, to raise a little bit of money and have an adventure. No, not the States, sorry. The UK, the UK. I’m getting ahead of myself now that I live in the States.

Show Notes

Dominic and Nadia’s production company is called Encompass Films

Amazon Prime offers Take a Seat: Sharing a Ride Across America and Take a Seat: Egypt for purchase.