“It’s sad that they don’t have a home.”
Samuel, on why he wants to do thisSamuel said he wanted to cycle around the world.
That was it. No plan, no route, no sense of what he was asking for. Just that.
What came later was what it was for. There has always been a dog in this house. One from a shelter, others that turned up at the door and stayed. He grew up with the idea that a dog you find is a dog you keep.
We came back to it later, when the first excitement had worn off, and asked him if he really meant it. On a bicycle. For that long. He did.
So he wanted to stop at shelters along the way. And we said yes. And then the arithmetic started.
We had planned electric bikes. Safer, we thought, and easier for a boy his age.
Then we found out batteries over 160 Wh are not allowed on aircraft at all, and we have three flights to make. And that a motor that fails in Laos or Morocco is not something you fix by the roadside.
So it became ordinary bikes. Which meant shorter days, which meant a longer trip. Fifty kilometres instead of eighty. A rest day after every three or four. Nineteen months instead of eighteen.
Samuel was disappointed. He liked the idea of the electric bike. Then he said he would do it on a normal one.
Twenty thousand kilometres under his own steam.
He leaves behind his school and his own room. And José, and that is the hardest one.
He turns twelve four weeks before he leaves, and comes home at thirteen. Without a motor we also had to change the route, so we took out the mountain passes wherever there was a way around.
This is not a holiday and it is not a stunt. It is nineteen months of getting up on the mornings when nobody wants to.
He is not the first boy to cycle around the world. He may be the first with a list of shelters in his pocket. In almost every country he stops at one. Fifty-six of them, from Morocco to Cambodia to America.
He films one dog. He tells you who they are. And then you give straight to that shelter, in that country, without a cent passing through us.
The first one was Pandora, in a shelter in Málaga, before a single kilometre had been ridden. She is still waiting.
That's the whole thing. No foundation, no salaries, no middlemen.
He turns twelve four weeks before departure. As far as we can find, no boy that age has ever set out to visit fifty-six animal shelters by bicycle. We are not chasing a record. Guinness stopped giving them for age, and we understand why.
At six years old, Samuel walked ten days of the Camino de Santiago. On his own legs, alongside his parents.
That is the boy who is about to spend nineteen months on a bike. This is not a sudden idea. It is the next thing.
Your money goes straight to the shelter's own donation page, in their country and their currency. Never through our account.
Food, ferries and a safe place to sleep for three people across twenty countries. We cannot fund nineteen months on our own.
Money for the journey is managed by Wendy Dirksen Hermans on behalf of Samuel Cycles the World. No foundation and no overhead.
In Morocco, ten euros feeds the three of us for a day. In Cambodia it's a bed for the night. In America it's a third of a motel room.
Katadyn came on board with our water and cooking gear, and Kryptonite with the locks. The rest is people who say: go on then, we'll carry a bit of it.
Every donation goes through GoFundMe and is covered by their Giving Guarantee. Managed by Wendy Dirksen Hermans on behalf of Samuel Cycles the World.
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