The end of term has arrived. I’ve started writing this in a town called Aviemore in the Cairngorms, in our staff house at the end of a cul-de-sac which looks a bit like Privet Drive. It’s where I’ve finished my season after my final trip on the Isle of Skye. Cardboard boxes of equipment are being shuttled out of the garage into our Backroads vans. Some will head to a storage unit ready to be opened up again next April, others will be taken back to HQ in Provence. The birch forests around us have turned yellow. It’s the end of my first season with Backroads, where I’ve run twelve trips and taken 134 guests around Scotland (and a little bit into the north of England).

There is a definite end of term feeling as we go our own ways for the winter and say our farewells. I’m half expecting that we will whip out the marker pens and start scrawling names on each others polo shirts. A moment to reflect on the new friends I’ve made, places I’ve got to know and things I’ve learned over the summer.

Someone asked me how Backroads has been compared to how I expected. The honest answer is that I don’t quite remember what I expected. Maybe I should be paying more attention, but often I do think: well, I wasn’t precisely expecting anything. I had a general idea, and it played out quite similarly. The colour has now been filled in, but I wasn’t trying to colour it in beforehand, I just had the outline. I guess it’s the way my life has been lately, trying not to have too many preconceptions.

But the headline is: good. One nice thing is that I’ve gone back to work and started earning a little money again. Good. A bit of income = sustainable = good. And it’s been fun! I can genuinely say that the alarms gone off on 9 out of 10 mornings and I’ve wanted to get out of bed and start the working day.

For those who don’t know what I’ve been doing (or don’t care, also fair, but I will tell you anyway); it works like this… with my co-leader we will pick up a bunch of guests from Edinburgh (they’re usually from the US, but sometimes Canada and sometimes Brazil). We will then do a six day tour of some nice spots, with the core part of our days dedicated to cycling or hiking. We’ll stay in three different (super nice) hotels, and finish the day with dinner together or a cultural activity. For example, we have a highland games demonstration with Kyle who is literally the highland games champion, and anyway we’re mates now, and so if anyone wants to pick a fight, don’t, he’s been training me all summer and I can throw a big stone really far.

And that’s it. I spend a lot of my day driving a van, riding a bike with guests, counting them, making sure they don’t get lost, setting pace and expectations for the day, chatting and getting to know them, sorting out any problems which come up. And the problem solving really can be fun, and sometimes involves driving a van (safely) like a madman (within the speed limit) around the little winding roads of the Yorkshire Dales. Like when I came across unexpected roadworks and my co-leader wasn’t answering their phone, so I had to bomb it to a spot to redirect fifteen cyclists and save them from having to re-trace their steps up one of Yorkshires steepest climbs. All with a smile of course, and trying to appear composed.

Really thought it’s just been great spending my days outside, in and amongst life, out and about in the real world.

The most difficult part has been keeping my social battery charged, as there can be a lot of face time (and as one guest commented ‘George is introverted, and as an introvert, that does get noticed’ - cheers, pal!). But you get a surprising number of moments to yourself in some of the most wonderful spots in the UK, and have to pinch yourself when you realise you’re getting paid to do this.

I once read some general criteria which one should look for in a job (credit to 80,000 hours for this one), and I’d have to say that Backroads ticked most of those boxes this season:

✅ Engaging work that lets you enter a state of flow (freedom, variety, clear tasks, feedback)

✅ Work that helps others - I mean, I’m not saving lives, but there is definitely satisfaction in making somebody’s holiday

✅ Work you’re good at - I think I have a decent skillset for the job

✅ Supportive colleagues - most are wonderful

✅ No major negatives, like long hours or unfair pay

❓ A job that fits your personal life - the jury is out

I say the jury is out because designing my life around work has been the biggest challenge. I’ve weirdly felt happier this summer when I’m working. Between trips we live in a shared house with colleagues, so I’ve found myself in a wonderful community, with fun and inspiring people around. But it can be a lot always being in the Backroads bubble. And with just a few days between trips, spending a day travelling each way to visit friends and family can feel equally draining. So this is where I’ve struggled most this summer, fitting my life in with Backroads, and something I should probably tweak next summer.

But in another way, this job fits my personal life in a wonderful and rare way. The season runs April-October, and so I get the winter to do some projects outside of work - travel, study, find time for things I love. I’m in a constant battle between feeling desperate for a place to settle, whilst enjoying the liberty this job is giving me to move around and experience different places.

Like now, where I’m in Granada studying Spanish until the end of the year.

I’ve been flirting with the idea of a digital detox. Keep dipping my toe in. I’m fed up with how my smartphone is messing up my brain, so I’ve bought a brick and go through periods of not carrying my smartphone with me (I usually check my WhatsApp web at the end of the day). It’s not really because of the troublesome doom-scrolling, it’s more the fact that being slightly bored has caused me to automatically reach for my pocket, and I think it’s good to be bored sometimes. I’ll see how long it lasts and report back.

To support the switch, I bought a second hand Ipod Nano and found some new music to put onto it. One album was a recommendation from the most unexpected place: a trout farmer in the Scottish Highlands. We use his gaff as a place to stop for tea and cakes on one of our trips, and we got chatting in the car park, where he noticed my Hermanos Gutierrez t-shirt. “Been meanin tae listen tae them for a while noo, yous ever listened tae Analog Africa?” he said, “they have great stuff fae South America - their whole thing is: the future of music happened decades ago.” And so he started presenting his Bandcamp collection, and landed on recommending ‘Super Disco Pirata’ to me, a collection of salsa and cumbia tracks from the 60’s and 70’s, including a remix of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. The compilation is inspired by the bootleg vinyls pressed in Mexico City in the 80’s, bringing hard-to-get tracks from Colombia, Peru and Ecuador to ‘the sonideros’, mobile discos which would spin these records at street parties.

I also stuck DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS onto the Nano. If you’d have told me a year ago that Bad Bunny would be my most listened to artist this year, I wouldn’t have believed you. I’ve never been a huge fan of Reggaeton and Bad Bunny, but this album completely changed my mind. He’s combined his sound with traditional music from Puerto Rico, and I’m a complete convert. I’ve watched his tiny desk a number of times now.

Film wise, I stumbled across a documentary called Listers. It’s the best thing I’ve seen in a while, and free to watch on Youtube. Basically, two brothers got high, read through the family bird guide and thought it would be cool to be able to identify all the birds in the book. So they start a road trip across the US, embarking on a ‘big year’, where they try to spot as many bird species as they can. The storytelling is wonderful, filming is great (they switch between scratchy camcorder van footage and wonderful HD bird footage), and these brothers are just really really funny. It starts out: “this here be my older brother Quentin, and least year he was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of… Early Onset Birdwatcher’. I’m so glad to have found it.

I arrived here in Granada via land and sea. First, four days returning a Backroads van from the Cairngorms to Provence (Aviemore → Huddersfield → Eguisheim via Hull and Rotterdam → Beaune → Carpentras). I got to appreciate the wonderful Chapelle Saint-Léon in the medieval town of Eguisheim, and drove into the foothills of the Vosges to watch autumn run it’s cold but comforting hand up the spine of the Alsace vineyards.

I overtook the changing of the seasons in the fast lane of the A7 on the outskirts of Lyon. The poplars on the banks of the Rhone were shifting from light green to yellow, just as the birches up in the Cairngorms already had. In Provence everything was still pretty evergreen.

But now the changing of the seasons has caught up with me. I’ve been running in the late afternoons, up the north side of the Valparaiso valley, past the Monastery of Sacramonte and the old Gitano communities on the edge of Granada where flamenco was born. The poplars down by the river Darro are starting to show their autumn colours, and the swifts flit against the Andalucian skies, blue and bright. They are late, but will be in Africa soon as it sits just 14km over the Strait of Gibraltar, just to the south. Last night the first snow of the season fell under a super moon onto the Sierra Nevada mountains, and a chill has fallen across Granada. The skies remain clear.

Tomorrow I’ll take the train to Madrid to see Radiohead with my old colleague and good friend Jon.

Much love

George x