When Joel Schaefer set off on an epic bicycle ride across Great Britain and France he expected to spend four months cycling 1,500 miles.

Two days into the journey the life coach and former senior vice-president of the Argus Global Group, thought his ride was over.

“My Achilles tendons became inflamed,” he said.

Instead of quitting he took a few deep breaths and decided to solve the problem.

“You really have to learn to do that on the road,” he said. “You are on your own.”

With the help of the internet, the 63-year-old realised his bicycle seat was just a bit too high.

He took some time off to give his tendons a rest, then lowered the cycle seat and was off again.

He rode 373 miles from Edinburgh, Scotland, to Bristol, England, popping over to Belfast, Northern Ireland, to visit some friends for a few days.

“Belfast had the best street art,” he said. “Bristol was also good for art. The British graffiti artist Banksy is from Bristol.”

He specifically chose Edinburgh and Bristol as stopping points, on the strength of a recommendation from artificial intelligence.

“I asked it to tell me two cities in England that were like Asheville, North Carolina,” he said. “I had been to Asheville a few times and liked the college town vibe there.”

One of his challenges on the trip was his bike, a German touring cycle called a Tout Terrain.

“The bike was bulletproof, but it felt like a tank,” he said. “Everything was great about it except that it weighed 52lbs without any bags on it. It was a nuisance if you had to get it up stairs, or you were climbing a hill. Sometimes it slowed me down.”

It was a stronger bike than he needed.

Along the way he did some wild camping, camping without any particular permit or permission.

“You set up your tent when it is dark,” he said.

He found this easier to do in Scotland where the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, allows people to roam or camp on most unenclosed land for a night or two.

Mr Schaefer also used Warm Showers, an app which connects cyclists with hosts, usually other cyclists.

“You use the app to contact a host and say, I will be near you at such and such a time and date,” he explained. “You ask if they would be able to host you for a night. If they say yes, you meet them and have a conversation. Sometimes you talk about what would be the best route to take. They often give you a bed, shower, dinner and breakfast. I did that many times.”

He cycled to Land's End, Cornwall, then on to Plymouth, Devon, where he caught the ferry to Roscoff a village of 3,000 or so people on the western coast of Brittany, France.

“There was this sense of victory cycling to Plymouth, because it meant I had come to the end of the road in England,” he said. “It was really hard to give up eating scones but croissants were good too.”

The ferry ride was overnight so he felt a little disoriented to arrive in Roscoff in the dark.

“It was 6am and I had to start riding on the other side of the road. I cycled into the town where everything was closed. It was eerie.”

By then it was October and autumn was setting in.

As he cycled up the coast towards Normandy, a series of fronts came through.

“I wanted to see the Normandy beaches and Mont Saint Michel,” he said.

When he arrived, however, the winds had reached hurricane force. Instead of cycling to Mont Saint Michel he took a bus.

“They had a special high-wind parking lot set up,” he said.

After seeing the historic sites of the D-Day landings, Mr Schaefer ended his journey in Paris, where he spent a month.

Looking back, he cannot pick a favourite spot on the trip.

“They were all wonderful in their own way,” he said. “I found these wonderful gems in places that I didn’t expect.

“For example, I had never been to Wales before. I cycled diagonally across it and it was absolutely gorgeous. I would cycle up the hills, see the views and then the houses. Suddenly, I would be in some small town where I could get coffee and lunch.”

The best part of the adventure was chatting with whoever was around.

“It was just incredibly quaint and picturesque,” he said.

This was his second long ride. His first was 3,000 miles across America in 2023 when he turned 60.

“I don’t feel so much changed by this experience,” he said. “That probably happened the first time I did a long bike ride. It is more that I felt that I was expressing who I am. This ride was different from the first but wonderful in its own way.”

He is planning an even longer journey, next time on a lighter bike.

“My plan is to be nomadic, probably for about two years,” he said.

Mr Schaefer is not sure yet where he will do this but is looking at countries such as Thailand and New Zealand.

He runs a business called Enrich that offers life and financial wellness coaching. His hope is to work while on the road.

He wants to show people what retirement or semi-retirement can look like.

“It sounds extravagant to travel for four months but the way I travelled was inexpensive,” he said. “When I compared the cost of everything to what it costs to live here in Bermuda, it was the same.”

He said the beauty of doing something like this was that life gets boiled down to the bare essentials.

“I only had two shirts so choosing what I was going to wear that day, was easy,” he said. “When you are on the bike there is a lot of space to just be. The mind slows down. You learn to appreciate everything from the beauty of the view around and the people you meet to the smells you come across.”