When the Road Went Quiet

*Context: This started as a simple excercise to include in an Update email, where I wanted to express the challenges Lisa and I have faced since our wheels stopped rolling. It was meant to be just a glimpse and then I kept writing. Then I wrote some more until it became pages of soul sharing...stuff. I left it sit for a few days until today when I cut away the blah and left in what I think was important for me to express and share. This is just my thoughts. Lisa's might be different and she might share them somewhere or she may not. I hope you enjoy the read and hopefully learn a little about who we are behind the 2Ride The World logo.

There is a moment, after 17 years of constant motion, when the engine stops, and you expect the world to keep humming.

...It doesn’t.

For nearly two decades, Lisa and I lived to a rhythm of bikes and travel. Wake up. Pack down. Check the chain. Scan the map. Chase the horizon. Repeat. The world was our front garden. Borders were just conversations waiting to happen. Our marriage grew somewhere between fuel stations and mountain passes.

Our life was called 2Ride The World, but it wasn’t a brand to us. It was our oxygen.

And then 2029 arrived. COVID closed the planet in a way no war, no bureaucracy, no impassable desert ever had. Borders didn’t just delay us. They locked. Flights disappeared. Shipping routes froze. For the first time in 17 years, the road didn’t feel uncertain. It felt unavailable.

"...That is a different kind of silence."

The Identity You Don’t Realise You’re Losing

When you ride long enough, the journey stops being something you do. It becomes who you are.

People would introduce us as “the couple riding around the world.” Not Simon. Not Lisa. Not husband and wife who once had a house, careers, routines.

Just… the riders.

And if I’m honest, I liked that. It was simple. Clear and earned.

Back in the UK, without the bikes, without the constant forward motion, I caught myself standing in a supermarket aisle staring at shelves longer than I ever stared at a map. I didn’t know which version of me was supposed to be choosing pasta sauce.

It sounds ridiculous. It wasn’t.

There were mornings I woke up expecting altitude, humidity, dust. Instead, there was still air. No engine vibration under my arse. No unknown ahead. Just familiarity. And after 17 years of unfamiliar, familiarity felt foreign. No, more than that...familiarity felt terryfying.

Lisa said something one evening that stopped me in my tracks.

“I don’t miss the danger,” she said quietly, scrolling through thousands of photographs she had taken over the years. “I miss the becoming.”

That hit hard.

Out there, we were always becoming 'something'. Stronger. Wiser. More patient. More adaptable. Back home in the UK, growth felt slower. Less dramatic. Harder to measure.

Who are you when the story people admire is finished?...Fuck!

The Financial Reality Nobody Applauds

Adventure looks romantic from the outside. Sunsets. Smiles. Epic landscapes.

The bank account rarely makes the highlight reel. Although it funny, in a sad way, pressumptions are made by people who think they know us.

For years we lived carefully. Savings, small sponsorship deals, print sales, speaking events. We learned to stretch a pound across continents. The road paid for the road, just about. But it never built long-term security.

When the ride stopped, so did the income that depended on it.

No events. No live audiences. No travel. No bike-related partnerships. Just two people with extraordinary experience and a very ordinary list of bills.

There is something humbling about going from crossing deserts to filling in business grant applications.

We had to confront questions we had successfully postponed for 17 years. Pensions. Long-term stability. Health. Insurance. A fixed address.

It felt like learning to walk again, except everyone assumes you already know how.

Reinventing Ourselves, Not Just Our Work

Reinvention sounds glamorous. It isn’t. It is uncomfortable. It is vulnerable.

We took our photography, shaped by six continents and countless human stories, and began building something rooted. Workshops. Mentoring. A creative community. Watching Lisa pour the same passion she once aimed at a Himalayan pass into helping others see differently has been one of the most beautiful transitions I’ve witnessed.

We worked hard and there have been too many high points to list but but one stand-out moments happened at the start of 2025. We were invited to exhibit our work at the XPOSURE International Photography Festival and were presented a Photographic Recognition of Excellence Award by His Highness Sheikh Sultan bin Ahmed Al Qasimi. Stood on stage with some of the most celebrated and recognised photographers of the century was...surreal and humbling.

• Learn more: www.livinglens.photography/post/winning-a-major-international-photographic-award

• If you'd like to know more about our workshop and educational programmes: www.livinglens.photography

I also returned to my entrepreneurial instincts. Design. Branding. Strategy. Creating businesses instead of kilometres. It felt like picking up an old tool I hadn’t used in nearly two decades. Rusty at first. Then steady.

• Again, if you'd like to learn more: www.livinglens.photography/nomad-graphics

But the hardest shift wasn’t professional. It was internal.

Without motorcycles in the garage (yep, our bikes are still in the US), without departure dates pinned to a wall, I had to sit with myself. No distraction of border crossings. No adrenaline of the unknown.

Just me. For a long time I wasn't enough.

There were days I missed the simplicity of the road so much it hurt. Out there, your job is clear. Survive. Navigate. Connect. Move. Back here, purpose must be built and invented, not discovered at the end of a dirt track.

Marriage After the Miles

Seventeen years together on motorcycles compresses a relationship in ways most couples never experience.

We have faced crashes. Illness. Corrupt officials. Mechanical failures in places where recovery trucks do not exist. We have disagreed in deserts and laughed hysterically in monsoonsOK, admittedly that was mostly Lisa laughing at me.

The road shaped our marriage. It stripped ego quickly. You cannot carry resentment across 500 miles of remote terrain. You sort it out or you suffer.

When the ride stopped, the intensity changed. No shared daily mission. No joint navigation. Suddenly, space.

And space can be confronting.

We had to learn how to be together without a map between us. To build something new rather than simply ride toward it. To redefine partnership not as co-riders, but as co-creators.

In many ways, this has been the most grown-up chapter of our relationship.

Less adrenaline. More intention.

Grief for a Life Still Technically Ours

The strange thing is, the bikes still exist. The memories are intact. The world is still out there.

But that chapter, the continuous non-stop flow of 17 years, is finished.

There is grief in that. Although, it took me far too long to really understand why I felt what I felt, and identify it as grief.

Sometimes it sneaks up in small ways. The smell of fuel. A documentary scene of a remote border crossing. The feel of wind on an exposed hill in the UK that almost, almost feels like Patagonia.

I miss the movement. I miss the rawness. I miss the version of me who knew exactly what tomorrow required.

But I also recognise something important.

The road did not make us resilient. It revealed that we already were.

And that resilience is now being applied somewhere different.

A Different Kind of Adventure

We are building again.

New businesses. New communities. New creative projects. Speaking. Teaching. Sharing not just the highlight reel, but the unfiltered reality of what long-term adventure costs and gives.

The motorcycles may not be in a UK garage. The horizon may not be foreign soil. But growth is still happening.

Just slower. Quieter. Deeper.

If you are in a season where something defining has ended, I want you to know this: stopping is not failure. Reinventing is not betrayal of your past. It is proof that you are still alive.

Seventeen years taught us how to move through the world.

This chapter is teaching us how to root.

And maybe, just maybe, that is the greater challenge.

Simon Thomas