About us and our trip

Our names are Adie Mitchell and Rob Sohmer. We went to high school together in New York City and are both on our gap year before going to college. We both have a love for cycling, the outdoors and creating things.

The things we like to create tend to be beautiful through their functionality. Between us we have built everything from bikes to kayak to bags. We have hiked in around a dozen countries and have been cycling together regularly for about a year.

In a few weeks we are going on a 2 month long bike trip in France and Spain. We hope that this trip will unite our three passions of making things, cycling and being in the outdoors. We are planning on cycling a southerly route through France and into Spain. Our trip is unique in several ways. We will be riding fixed-gear bicycles, the frames of which we built ourselves out of bamboo and carbon fiber. We plan on camping almost every night of our two month trip. Over several years of hiking and camping, we have come to follow the principles of ultra-light backpacking and are applying these ideas in new ways to travelling by bike. Particularly, we love the Make Your Own Gear (MYOG) aspect of the ultralight ideology. We have already built our bamboo bikes and will be making a lot of our own gear for camping and cycling.

This blog will follow our preparations for the trip including MYOG tutorials, and will then become a blog about our trip that we will update as we cycle. We hope this blog will be a reflection of our growth as independent adults, willing to create, adjust, challenge, and be inspired by the world around us.