Deriva Lenta Slowbiking was born from the way I truly travel. I’m the first to admit that I don’t have as much time as I’d like to explore all the routes that linger in my mind. I work full-time and have just 24 working days of holiday each year. Even so, I’ve managed to slip away for two (and sometimes even three) weeks at a time to ride long-distance routes. But those journeys come one by one, scattered across different years, like small treasures that are hard to repeat.
I’ve also always travelled with a good dose of improvisation. I usually draw the track without fully knowing what I’ll find along the way, where I’ll sleep, or what the terrain will be like. I love that sense of drift, but that doesn’t mean I’m careless: I plan the distance, the elevation, and an estimate of days; I add a couple more in case I fall ill, or if the weather turns and I need to wait it out. Even so, more than once I’ve had to shorten the route and rewrite the ending just to make it home on time and keep up with my responsibilities.
I’m telling you this because I don’t think we should wait an entire year to experience the journeys that stir something deep inside us. For a long time, I made the mistake of dismissing short getaways:
“Packing panniers for just two days? What a hassle.”
“If it’s not at least two weeks, it doesn’t count as a holiday.”
And so, between excuses, I stayed home instead of giving myself even a single night under the stars.
Night photography taught me another way of travelling. I looked for places with little light pollution, studied the rise of the Milky Way, and searched for old farmhouses, lone trees, or shapes that could give meaning to the composition. And so I began slipping away on Friday afternoons, or early on Saturday mornings, with the bike loaded only with what I needed to survive a couple of days lost in DL Slow territory. It changed me: I discovered I could gift myself small holidays many times a year. Sometimes a single night in the mountains is enough to return home with a renewed soul.
And that’s where the DL Slow loops come from: they were born out of those escapes. Some appear in the route just as I lived them; others have changed shape, because back then they weren’t circular or because the experience led me down unexpected detours. But the philosophy remains the same.
If you have the time to complete the whole journey, go for it: it will be long, deep, and unhurried.
But if you don’t (because life is busy, because you work, because you can only slip away for a couple of days), the loops offer a different doorway: short, flexible escapes that let you return to yourself.
No time for two weeks, but one?
Link a couple of loops and enjoy the drift.
Just a weekend?
Maybe that’s enough for a loop.
You choose how to explore this landscape.
I simply offer possible paths to help you begin more easily.
Would you like to follow Deriva Lenta’s journey?
Deriva Lenta has been built step by step, making conscious decisions along the way.
If you feel like following how the project evolves when there is something to share, the slowletter is the most direct channel.
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