Wigan man completes mammoth 10-month bike ride across 13 countries

Sam Lloyd spent from February until December last year cycling from Gibraltar to Ukraine and back again.

He left Gibraltar on February 12 and returned three days before Christmas.

During the course of 10 months he visited Gibraltar, Spain, France, Italy, Slovenia, Austria, Hungary, Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Germany and Switzerland.

He also met a variety of interesting people along the way including a former criminal-turned-pilgrim as well as the ambassador to Pope Francis in Hungary.

Sam said: “I’m just passionate about cycling, I’m ex-merchant Navy so it’s in the blood for me to travel.

"I wanted to go on a bike ride and experience life and learn.

“It was an amazing journey exploring not just this amazing planet that we live on but learning about places, people restoring my faith in humanity and about myself.

“They say a 1,000-mile journey begins with a single step but in my case it was thousands of miles with a revolution of the pedals taking me to extraordinary places, through cities, villages, towns, along the Mediterranean coast, mountains, country lanes and many more.

"I met the ambassador to Pope Francis through a blind man called Robert and his son Alexander.

"I slept in a doorway in Hungary and they thought I was breaking into the church.

"They got a phone call saying there was something unusual happening and the man was led by his son across the road to the church.

"Because he couldn’t speak any English he put me on the phone to Sister Anna and Sister Christina who invited me to spend five days with them at a convent near Miskolch.

"I cycled five days in a direction I didn’t intend to go because the blind man connected me to them.”

Sam has slept in doorways and had to rely on the likes of convents and monasteries for shelter and went bin-diving at supermarkets to get food while he was travelling.

Sam added: “Meeting people I’d not ordinarily meet and witnessing kindness along the way, I must give thanks to the wider catholic church who helped to make my journey in faith a reality.

"Coming into contact with friars, monks, nuns, priests and ordinary folk who all made my journey very special.

"I slept in a few caves, abandoned houses and by rivers.

"I get tired but I never get bored, I’ve also got past the stage of being lonely.

Sam wants to do more pilgrimages and is aiming to cycle to China in the future.

He said: “Each time I embark upon a journey I change, I grow, I stretch and learn more not just of this beautiful planet we live on but about myself growing spiritually within.

"If doctors prescribed a pilgrimage rather than medication we would live in a better world.

“There is healing in nature simple things that we take for granted such as watching the sunrise and set, the birds in the sky, watching the water flow and listening to the wind and feeling it blow on our face appreciating the moment letting go of the past things that have hurt us not focusing on the future but living and appreciating the present moment.