Welcome to Thoughts from the Road. Ellen and Sven have ridden the length of the Americas over nearly two years covering 70,000kms… After such a mamoth trip, here’s what happens when the road burns you out…
Thoughts From the Road is a corner on Mad or Nomad for motorcycle travellers to share short stories from their experiences travelling the world. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments and join the discussion.
Getting Burned Out on the Road
By Ellen and Sven
Motorcycle travellers - Bikemituns
Hey! We’re Ellen and Sven from northern Germany and we’re known as ‘bikemituns’ which translates as ‘bikewithus’. We have been together since 2016 and in 2022 we spontaneously decided to quit our jobs and travel the world for 5-6 months. Spoiler alert: We’re still travelling!
We started out backpacking through 9 countries in Asia but then swapped our backpacks for our motorcycles, which we had missed so much. We rode through 11 European countries in two attempts due to major accidents. Sven was hit by a car in Montenegro and Ellen broke her foot in Kosovo. In total we covered around 18,000 km.
We shipped our bikes to Vancouver in Canada, dipped our toes in the Arctic Ocean at Tuktoyaktuk and rode south with plenty of detours to Ushuaia covering 70,000km in 21 months.
You can follow our adventures here:
Insta: bikemituns
Facebook: bikemituns
YouTube: @bikemituns
Tired ‘from’ – not tired ‘of’
We are tired from travelling. I know these two words don’t usually go together. But they do for us right now. Travelling around the world on our motorcycles is what we describe as pure freedom.
When you travel like this and enjoy it to the fullest, you enter a kind of trance. You absorb all the memories, but can’t process them all at once. It’s the best feeling, almost addictive, but there are moments when you come to realise what you have done… and it can be overwhelming.
There are so many fun moments on the road, but also many challenges and it can be draining. It’s not physical tiredness, it’s more – mental. We have experienced that feeling before and we tried our best to avoid it by travelling slowly, but it hit us again after a long time.
We are living the dream, but our minds feel burned out. Riding our motorcycles but not really enjoying it. You pass famous sights and wonders of nature but they leave you cold.
Options….
You could of course force yourself to continue, but that’s probably the worst thing you could do. The cure? A break. This looks very different for everyone. If your budget allows, you could fly home to enjoy some time with friends, family and get your comfort food.
Or you could fly somewhere else for a holiday. Most of us live our normal lives on the road, this can be tough. Alternatively, you could just stay somewhere nice, relax and establish a routine for a little while.
None of this made sense for us. We are just months away until we need to return back to normal life and save up our money for the next adventure anyway. Doing a whole different continent with our motorcycles is just not in our budget. We could have forced ourselves to see more of South America, but we didn’t feel like it.
Do what’s best for you
So, we chose to drop our bikes off early so they get shipped to Germany. And in the meantime, we are flying to Japan for a couple of months before returning home.
Sometimes, you’ll get burned out on the road – and that’s okay. What’s important is that you recognise it and take the right steps for what works best for you.
For us, we haven’t given up. We’re just closing this chapter to prepare for the next one.
Ellen and Sven
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Share your thoughts in the comments below…
Great read! Enjoy your well deserved break in Japan.
A very interesting article that not many discuss! Have a fantastic time exploring Japan and a good rest. All the best
Yeah you both definitely deserve a rest in my book! haha
That’s a seriously long time to be travelling for anybody. Ta
Enjoy your Time in Japan. Thanks for sharing your story.